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.

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!

jQuery is hot! And we have none other than Joe Brinkman, CTO of DotNetNuke Corp speaking at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group on January 21st (ATT building on Gallows Road, Vienna, Va).

Joe with give a brief introduction on what jQuery is, then how it is used in DotNetNuke. Very cool.

Our speaker next month at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) is Joe Brinkman. We are still working out the date and location of the meeting which we should lock down in the next week. We plan to move our meeting date because it falls within the week of the Presidential Inaguration, so we expect DC traffic to be a mess.

Joe Brinkman, DotNetNuke VP Core Technology and Co-founder, Microsoft MVP

Something I did not know about Joe until I read his bio is that he's a Naval Academy Grad. Of course, if he is a football fan, he must have been very excited about Navy's great season.

Mitchell Sellers has an excellent guide for upgrading your DNN instance. You can find it here.

We have Chris Hammond coming to talk with us at the Capital Area DotNetNuke User Group (http://www.capitaldug.org) meeting this coming Wednesday, May 21st. Chris is a core team member of the DotNetNuke development team.

This will be a great meeting for those interested in developing DotNetNuke Modules!

The meeting starts at 7pm at the ATT offices in Tysons Corner, in Vienna, Virginia.

On Saturday, March 29th, software developers from around the Metro DC area met to listen to presentations by over a dozen software experts. The presentations included a range of topics from new technologies being released by Microsoft to practices to improve quality and delivery management.

This event was free to the public and was hosted by Strayer University in Woodbridge, Virginia. Attendance was over 80, with some attendees coming from as far away as York County.

John Morales at Nova CodeCamp Event discussing AJAX Development

Jeff Schoolcraft and I coordinated this event, but it was the volunteers and speakers that donated their time that made this event a success. We were fortunate to receive sponsorship from several companies and organizations.

You can find out more about Nova CodeCamp at www.novacodecamp.org.

Working with Microsoft MVP, Jeff Schoolcraft, we have organized a wonderful developer learning event on Saturday, March 29th at Strayer University in Woodbridge, Va.

CodeCamp SOUTH

Speakers include:

• Brian Noyes, Microsoft MVP
• Jonathan Cogley, Microsoft MVP
• Sahil Malik, Microsoft MVP
• Frank LaVigne, Microsoft MVP
• Antonio Chagoury, DotNetNuke Team Lead

and many more.

Topics to be covered include a host of new technologies along with some introductory courses. Here is a sample (you can see the rest at the NovaCodeCamp site).

• Visual Studio 2008
• SQL Server 2008
• SharePoint 2007
• DotNetNuke Module Development
• Office 2007 Development
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Development
• Ajax
• Silverlight

For you developers, this is a golden opportunity to see presentations that would typically be presented at high priced conferences like Microsoft TechEd and VSLive. And it is FREE. However, registration is limited to the first 100 that sing up - so make your reservation today!

Did you ever want your DotNetNuke URLs to present a more human readable (more easily remembered) URL? Well, there is a new feature in DNN 4.7 that you can set to easily set.

Instead of your URLs showing something like www.mydotnetnukesite.com/tabid/825/EntryID/479/Default.aspx for your "About Page", to something like www.mydotnetnukesite.com/about.aspx.

You have to add the following attribute to the DNNFriendlyUrl element in the Web.config: urlFormat="HumanFriendly".

See the following blog by Chris Hammond on the DNN Team for more inforamtion.

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/1637/Default.aspx

Scott Schecter comes to my rescue. We are working on a DNN site that needed the radio buttons turned off. Here is his link discussing how to turn off the search radio buttons for DotNetNuke 4.5.2 (and above).

It is a setting in the .ascx skin file. Add the two attributes in red as shown below for the dnn:SEARCH element.

          <
          dnn:SEARCH
          runat
          ="server"
          id
          ="dnnSEARCH"
          
            showWeb
            ="False"
            showSite
            ="False"
          
          />
        

I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group last night.

Here is my powerpoint presentation on Performance Testing on DotNetNuke.

CDUG Performance Testing DotNetNuke.pptx (574.63 KB)

I have worked on some very large DotNetNuke websites (100k+ users), and while performance is typically fairly good, there are times when the websites are very slow, and in some cases the pages "timeout".

Many times the performance of the website is directly attributable to the performance of the database. Often this is due to the volatile nature of your database resulting in the table indexes becoming fragmented. This means that look up queries could run slower over time.

If you are experiencing performance issues coming from your database, check the fragmentation on your indexes on your DNN tables (particularly those associated with your user accounts). Below is the SQL Server 2005 interface for viewing index fragmentation (on an AdventureWorks table).

While this interface (above) is useful for a looking at a few tables, one at a time, there are quite a few DNN tables in a typical installation, and this can get tedious. Here is an excellent article, "Queries Dragging? Try Defragging" ,  in SQL Server Magazine  (InstantDoc 96059), by Eric Peterson, with a downloadable stored procedure that you can use to analyze and tune the fragmentation of your table indexes. The stored procedure will save you a lot of time in analyzing and defragging tables.

Who: Capital DotNetNuke User Group

When: Thursday, June 21st

Where: AT&T Building, 1900 Gallows Road, Vienna VA 22182

ACRITECH is sponsoring the meeting on Thursday. Come out, eat pizza, and learn how to develop add-ins for the best open-source content management system on the Internet.

Interested in the latest happenings in implementing blogging in DotNetNuke?

My friend, Antonio Chagoury (picture below), is the Team lead on the DotNetNuke Blog module. The team has a blog here. I am very excited to see Antonio more actively involved with the DNN project! He is working very hard to get the DotNetNuke user group in the Washington, D.C. area up and running, and I know he is planning a very exciting lineup of events. 

Not to give him a swelled head, but when we worked together Antonio was doing some very, very creative things in both the DNN space and in Web Services. Fortunately, he is now out where his creativity, development skills, and leadership can be better appreciated (much better). The more actual development work I do (including on DNN) the more I appreciate what he accomplished when we worked together, and I am embarrassed to say that I did take him for granted and was none-to-kind to him many times (hopefully, mentioning it publicly will allow me to redeem myself a little bit).

In many ways, Antonio and I are very much alike (and that should scare a lot of people that we both know).

You can check out his personal blog at the link below.

--

Enjoy!

I have run the DNN installs several times, but I ran into a few problems on the 4.4 - that I was able to figure out.

First problem: You may run into is when the install says it can't find the Compression.config file. Those are purposely placed in a Config directory until needed. Guess what? You need the Compression.Config during the initial installation.

Solution: Move or copy the Compression.config to the root directory of your DNN website.

Second Problem: I get the dreaded exception of Object reference not set.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.] DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalSettings.GetPortalSettings(Int32 TabId, PortalAliasInfo objPortalAliasInfo) +127 DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalSettings..ctor(Int32 tabId, PortalAliasInfo objPortalAliasInfo) +93 DotNetNuke.HttpModules.UrlRewriteModule.OnBeginRequest(Object s, EventArgs e) +3718 System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication+IExecutionStep.Execute() +59 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +87

For more information, check out Shaun Walker's installation directions at the following post.