Will Strohl's Blog

In this episode, we decided to have our guest be the topic.  The DNN 8 release was so HUUUUUUGE that we felt that it needed to speak for itself.  DNN 8 brings with it a ton of new features that developers can take advantage of.  These things include new MVC and SPA development patterns.  Patterns that never before existed officially and never before came supported out of the box.

While this is nearly a month late in getting posted, the show isn’t any less important.  Not by a longshot.  In fact, it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done.  In this show, we speak with Ralph Williams.  If you’ve been around DNN for any length of time, you know that we all know Ralph for one thing… his amazing theming (skinning) work.  He’s one of the minds behind the initial Day of DotNetNuke branding, technical presentations on best practices as it relates to DNN theming, theming training at all of the recent DNNCon events, and wrote the theme chapter in the latest DNN book.  In this show, we didn’t speak to Ralph about themes at all.  We spoke about the MODULE that he built.  Not just any module either… a SPA-based, video-centric LMS module!

This is the second of two special episodes of the DNN Hangout, focused on helping DNN developers world-wide to learn more about the DNN 8 module development patterns.  This time, we walked through the MVC development pattern in DNN.  Following this hangout, you should have all of the knowledge you need to get started building your module for the DNN 8 Module Development Contest. 

This month is a hangout that I’m very proud to have been a part of.  For one reason, we announced an exciting DNN 8 module development contest.  A contest that will yield some people in the community a lot of cash.  The other reason, is that I have the honor of interviewing one of my favorite DNN brothers, Clint Patterson.  I think you’ll agree by the end of the hangout – if it takes you that long – that Clint is one of the smartest people in our community, and easily one of the most resourceful, passionate, and sincere members we have.  We are lucky to have him in our community.

We had planned to speak with Phillip Becker this month, but he had a personal emergency he had to tend to.  We’ll get that rescheduled for you soon…  Go figure – we got the technical issues solved, and we loose the speaker.  This left us to get creative last minute and come up with a show for you – and we did.  In this show, we pull out some of our tips and tricks, in addition to bringing you the typical DNN news.

Every now and again, we’ll throw in a special episode of DNN Hangout, where we talk about something that we believe will be extra beneficial to the community.  Sometimes this will have one or more special guests attached to it, sometimes it won’t.  In this special episode, Joe Brinkman and I walk through the source code of DNN platform.  It’s grown so much over the years that we realize just how intimidating it can be to someone.  After watching this hangout, that intimidation should be at a minimum.

It’s always exciting for me to meet someone in the DNN community that I haven’t met before.  This hangout is one of those times.  In this hangout, we speak with Jess (or Jean-Sylvain Boige) of Aricie.  He’s the CTO of Aricie and the genius mind behind the module for DNN called PortalKeeper.  I must admit, I didn’t know anything about PortalKeeper before this hangout, but rest assured… this is going to be a pretty standard tool of mine for current and future projects.  If you’ve gotten even the beginnings of a technical bone in your body, you’re sure to geek-out just like I did!

This month we had the pleasure to speak with Mitchel Sellers.  He’s a long-time DNN supporter and advocate.  Aside from being a DNN and Microsoft MVP, he’s literally written the book on extending DNN through modules.  He’s regularly found at community events, and pretty much everywhere online, attempting to help people with their C# and DNN needs. 

In this episode, we have the pleasure to speak with another veteran of the DNN community, Mandeep Singh.  Mandeep is the CEO and founder of Mandeeps, one of the most successful and seasoned vendors in the DNN ecosystem.  Like some of our previous guests, Mandeep has been using DNN since the beginning – and it shows.  He and his team have been extremely successful in building up a large following of customers due to their focus on usability and support.  As you’ll soon find out, they are raising the bar with the latest Live Forms release.

Practice makes perfect, right?  At least that’s what “they” say.  In this case, we attempted to do a special edition DNN Hangout about DNN and GitHub.  Unfortunately, the first time we did it, we only showed a single screen.  So we did it again!  In this hangout, we focus on the process and steps that are performed when you contribute to the DNN GitHub project.  This will be helpful to not only understand the process, but also get some ideas for process in your own projects.