[slides below]

I had a great time. Thanks to my audience for playing a long.

Thanks to Kevin, Andy, Kevin, Darrell, Justin and Susan for having me. We had a great time. Got to sit in on some great presentations on MVC, Silverlight+WPF, SSIS.

Great to see Andy, Roberto, and a whole slew of other folks that I normally see in Nova. And always good to see Andrew Duthie, Microsoft Evangalist Supreme.

Here are my slides:

Well, I shot my mouth off about giving a presentation on how to give presentations.

So the good folks at the Richmond CodeCamp are giving me a forum on Saturday, April 25th. I better be good because they put my in the big auditorium at J. Sargent Reynolds Community College.

Richmond CodeCamp 2009.1 Sessions

Lots of great presentations being given by the folks down there, so come out. You just might learn something!

Of course, here is was what happened at my last presentation...

I'm building another virtual SharePoint development environment. Unfortunately, I did not adequately size my VHD -- and with all the applications (Office, SharePoint Designer, VS2008) -- that takes up a lot of space.

Rebuilding a new VHD would be time consuming.

So, what is the least expensive and least time consuming way to enlarge a VHD?

You are going to need to use a couple of programs.

Download VHDResizer from vmToolkit. This is a simple to use tool, but it is only part of the solution. With this tool you can enlarge the available space, but next you have to extend the partition. You can use diskpart.exe (in your Windows/System32 folder).

Here is the trick, though. If you try this within Virtual PC, etc., still using the original VHD as your C drive, you will run into an error, "The volume you have selected may not be extended". If you have another Virtual computer, add the extended VHD as an additional drive, and use the diskpart program on it.

You can follow this guide to get you through.

I updated the CAPAREA website from DNN 4.0 to 4.92.

I found a very good guide for steps to take to implement an upgrade from such an old version of DNN here by Brian Swanson. As he says in his guid -- BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!

Also, based on Antonio Chagoury's recommendation, I implemented the upgrade with this approach:

1. Upgrade DNN site with aliases to run on local computer
2. Download DNN files from website to local computer
3. Setup local IIS to run DNN site locally - but using the production database (make sure it runs locally)
4. Get copy of DNN Upgrade and copy into local directory overwriting older DNN files
5. Modify the release.config and rename it web.config (see Brian's guide above)
6. Execute the upgrade locally
7. If upgrade worked, then copy all files to product web server, overwriting older files.

Special note: Check the bin folder for older DNN files (particularly HttpModule DLLs) that are no longer needed. If DNN executes reflection against these deprecated DLLs, it may cause problems. I had a problem getting to the Host menu pages.

Special thanks to Steve Raddich who runs BIT Shop hosting .

Last night I had the privelege at presenting at the Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals (CMAP) in Columbia, MD. I was invited to speak on DotNetNuke, and it turns out that I was the presenter on the evening when they celebrated their 7th birthday.

CMAP is a wonderful user group. They are very active and have found lots of ways to support the developer community in Maryland. Their management team of Randy Hayes (no relation) and Chris Steen are well known and well respected in the DC Metro user group community. Unfortunately, both Chris and Randy were at the Microsoft MVP summit in Washington state. However, Ed Mullin, the president of BaltoMSDN, a developers user group in Baltimore, MD, deftly handled the mast of ceremonies role, while Randy Hayes' wife, Kryselin (??), assisted as hostess. I was warmly received by the group, and appreciate them inviting me to speak.

Here are my slides from the presentation.

First blog entry for March 2009!

Mark this one as problem solved.

I am working on a project that uses ASP.NET Master Pages. I added an Ajax ModalPopupExtender to a Content page, but it was not rendering properly.

The modal panel was displaying at one location, not at the center of the page, and the shadow was displaying somewhere else. I discovered that the following DOCTYPE declaration was missing from the Master page.

Now the modal is displaying properly.

This page supported by ACRITECH Corporation .

Tom Kraak's (Seablick Consulting) presentation on Search Engine Optimization is now available as a webcast at CDUG.

DNN SEO

When you are a small business you have to take every opportunity you can to get your name and what you do in front of prospective customers. If you are a high tech company, one of the best ways is to have your company's link come up when someone does a search against one of the big search engines, Google, Microsoft Live Search, or Yahoo. Having your link pop up under certain circumstances could lead to considerable new business.

I have to admit, my own compay website, ACRITECH Corp, does not even show up when I search for software consulting companies in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

But after last Wednesday's Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG)meeting, I am starting to understand why. We had a wonderful presentation on search engine optimization (SEO), which is the optimization of your website so that when you "google" it, your links will have a high enough rating to appear near the top of the non-paid links returned. Tom Kraak, of Seablick Consulting, gave an enjoyable and enlightening discussion of SEO for DotNetNuke websites.

A lot of what Tom covered involved how to use the important features effectively in DNN. In addition to that, he discussed how to better position and write content so that the search engine bots would be more likely to properly asssociate your content with your website, thereby increasing your ranking through proper "categorization" (my quotes). Without some of this customization from an out-of-the-box DotNetNuke website, a basic DNN site is going to get lost in the ocean of the Internet.

Well, if you missed this presentation you will be happy to know that we are working on presenting this as a webcast at the Capital DotNetNuke user group website in the near future.

Kudos to Chris Hammond for his presentation at OpenForce entitled "Selling DotNetNuke, Why Your Clients Should Be Using It." All I can say for the DotNetNuke team is that we need more of that!

Every so often, I have to do database administration activities, like restore a database (typically a DotNetNuke database downloaded from a hosted site).

I know the details are in the SQL BOL, but I usually have to hunt for them. Pinal Dave's site comes to the rescue with a good abbreviated rundown of the RESTORE commands.

Pinal Dave's site is packed with lots of useful database information and I would highly recommend it to up and coming DBAs. He is a regular columnist for SQL Server Magazine.