I'm installing DotNetNuke v4.7 and I scroll to the bottom of the standard page that I've seen many times before, when lo and behold, I come across this for all to see!

Everyone who installs a brand new version of DotNetNuke gets to see a tiny photo of me on the cover with Shaun Walker. Sweet!

So, I wrote a book. I feel really fortunate to have had the experience and I am humbled by the idea that its on Amazon and store shelves across the country. The photo to the right is my brother-in-law and his charming wife with copy-in-hand, somewhere in NYC.

Late in 2006, Scott Vandehey and Kelly White were approached about writing this book. We (Pop Art) were putting the wraps on a successful 15+ month DotNetNuke project for a client and both of them had blogged a little about it. We had put together several DotNetNuke sites with an definite eye for design. After Scott Hanselman helped us dispel the notion that this book offer from Jim Minatel might be a hoax, ScottV and Kelly invited me to join the author team.

We, the three amigos, locked ourselves in a room (figuratively) and wrote down a draft set of chapters using index cards spread out over the table, and then handed out assignments. We went home and worked on a sample chapter to (1) prove to Jim that we could express ourselves sufficiently on paper and (b) to dip our toes into the waters of authorship.

When we reconvened a few days later, the mood and sobered up a little. Kelly was already full with a rich family life and a fledgling local developer community in the works. Scott had a brand new baby on the way too. The long-and-short of it is they were both honest and smart enough to know that the time commitment was too much. I have a lot of respect for them knowing it just wouldn't work rather than bailing out somewhere down the road. They showed a lot of class and professionalism.

I knew full well what I was getting into. Fortunately, so did my wife. She supported me so well during those non-stop evenings and weekends. It was a lot to bite off and she helped me so much just from the occasional drive-by-hug, or the smack-on-the-ass as I walked past her to refill my coffee cup.

I started my career with an internship at Andersen Consulting, then onto Peoples Energy, next was The Information Management Group, and now Pop Art. I've been developing software and consulting my entire career. Over time, I've learned a few important things like "Don't miss deadlines, period". So, it seemed reasonable to approach this endeavor in a similar manner. I worked out a schedule with Jim, my Senior Editor. I didn't really have anything to compare it to and Jim seemed OK with the plan so I just rolled with it. I entered into a contract with Wrox having every intention of living up to the letter and spirit of the agreement; just like any other client.

Every couple of weeks, I'd submit the next chapter to my editor, Christopher Rivera. He would manage the workflow on that side including comments from my awesome technical editor, Robert Bogue. I would occasionally have check-in phone calls with Christopher too. He did a fantastic job of helping me through this maze; a super nice guy.

Along about chapter 10 or so, Christopher chimed in on a conference call and said, "Wow, you're still on schedule. That's pretty rare." Now, I don't know about you, but that's about the worst thing he could have said for my motivation. I let out a big laugh and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was well aware of interviews with rock star developers like MLB and others who would sign a book deal, get past the due date for the final draft, and only then sit down and start writing it.

Come hell or high water, I was sticking with the impression that rock stars can do that but not little-ol-me. This self-imposed rule of hitting my final due date with solid material worked well for releasing relevant content and minimizing the impact of my home life. Kari was spectacular for eight long months, fifteen chapters, and over 400 pages - I sure do love her.

Towards the end, Jim moved to a new position and Chris Webb became my Senior Editor. I wrapped up the book in late August. It went to production and made it out in time for the awesome OpenForce '07 conference in Vegas next week. I would have loved to attend this conference but alas, I'm in San Jose all week on business and my six year wedding anniversary is next weekend too. Ah, the trump card.

So, I'm incredibly anxious to see what readers make of it. The book describes how to design sites with DotNetNuke using modern web techniques. I steered clear of any hardcore programming or database work, the core of this book is about the front end and how to make it do-what-it-do. Inside, you'll see how to maneuver around skins, containers, modules and apply modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript techniques to the various parts of DotNetNuke. Just to add some panache, I included a few scenarios with sIFR, Silverlight and the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit.

I learned a lot while I researched the nooks and crannies of this framework and I developed a sincere appreciation for the core team and all of their work to advance the platform. I haven't read tech books the same way since and the cliche dedications of "my spouse is so awesome" don't seem so cliche anymore. Its a humbling experience to have such a cool opportunity to impact a thriving community. The Wrox tag line is "Programmer to Programmer" and that's certainly the case here. I'm just a guy trying to help. I hope it helps you.

Wow! This is a pleasant surprize. The DotNetNuke site posted one of the sites we built in their showcase. It has a handsome number of stars lit up in the rating field too! The Los Angeles site is nice, but I think one of the other sites gets my vote for favorite. This is a partial list of the sites, including thumbnail images.

In 2006, Pop Art built new sites for SelecTruck dealers located all over the United States. about 24 sites in all; we did one for Pluto too (the moon er... object) since we built up so much steam. The sites share the same backend components, connect to a content syndication service as well as hosting their own unique content. Each site has a custom skin that promotes the ideals of the given dealership.

A great job by the entire team!

The Seattle Code Camp 2 was a great weekend. It was held at Digipen, the world's first video game university. Its a cool office, and judging by all of the labs, the auditorium, and extensive media clippings framed on the wall, its a fantastic place to learn 2D and 3D animation, game programming, art and anything else related to game development. Jason Mauer did a great job of pulling everything together. I'd love to help out and organize the next Portland or Seattle gathering.

My presentation on DotNetNuke and web content management went well; I think its got some legs. Here's the zip file of my presentation and the code I was talking about. This was the first time I've presented this material and it went fairly well. I really believe in the concepts that I've been whittling on and DNN has just been the delivery vehicle of the moment. I think it'd be a lot of fun to take this one on the road and hit up a couple of code camps in other cities. I wonder what The Wife would think of that?

One of my favorite presentors last weekend was Bill Vaughn. He's with Beta V, and a prolific author; he's written a couple of SQL Server books recently. I took advantage of the opportunity to learn quite a bit about SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition and Reporting Services from him.

The XNA team was also on hand to present some brand new material. The new beta is due very soon, if its not out already. Charles Cox was on hand (a Digipen graduate) to give a great demo on building a XBox 360 game with C#.

I was accepted to speak at the next Code Camp, the weekend of Oct 28th, in Seattle! Hooray!! I thought for a little bit on (A) what would be a fun topic and (2) what do I have to say about said fun topic. I finally settled on talking about something I do on a daily basis: balancing the needs of the web designer, leveraging sufficient power of a great platform (read that as using the base class libraries and everything else given to me), along with the needs of the client and the overall budget.

Our designers at Pop Art are top shelf. They've come up with some fantastic ideas for sites. They're on the leading edge of what's possible with today's browsers and giving consideration to the downlevel browser folk.

Given that, they have some high demands on the HTML emitted by anything on the server. It absolutely, positively must be W3C compliant. It doesn't matter if its HTML 4.01 Transitional, or HTML 1.0 Strict; so long as it conforms to the given specification. Gone are the days of using menu server controls that emitted glorious reams of <table>, <tr> and <td> tags. Enough for you to knit a small blanket. Amen for the CSS Control Adapters.

The designers have a lot to say on usability too. There are just some things that developers will step right over like a country boy; where as the country boy's college roommate visiting for the weekend will stop, stare, point, hold their nose and give it a wide birth.

Enter DotNetNuke. Out-of-the-box, DNN is a developers playground. They know there's so much capability under the hood that they're (and I'm generalizing here) too busy envisioning what they're going to build next instead of rethinking the user interface that a client would need to maintain a site. That seems like small potatoes next to the glorious reams of code we can write.

So, I've settled on presenting the issues, challenges, arguments, counter-points and three-point-takedowns that we've had to address over the past 18 months with DNN. That would be a little too gloomy, so the remaining 67% of the discussion will contain some solutions that bridge the gap and keep the web site looking beautiful long after it launches. My presentation is in no way the rule; simply my experiences in dealing with this issue since I came to Pop Art in 2002. As with most things, I'm sure they are lots of ways to handle them, and I'm as open minded as the next guy; providing the next guy is sans jerk.

A basic introduction of DotNetNuke would be better served by a different session, but people who've never downloaded the bits from www.dotnetnuke.com will still get a reasonable insight into the problem sets and ways to deal with them.

My basic fear is probably the same as any other presenter who ever presented in all of presentation-land: getting slotted in the same time slot as ScottGu or anyone else in the rock star line up. What a problem to have!!   :)

A few days ago, DotNetNuke® announced a new corporate entity. The new firm is based in Seattle, WA.

An snippet from the announcement:

In the four years since the DotNetNuke project was launched, it has seen its registered user ranks swell to 335,000 members and demand for its flagship product surpassing 2 million downloads worldwide. This worldwide adoption of DotNetNuke has created significant economic value both for the project and also the commercial ecosystem that it has spawned.

This sounds like a big step forward for them. I've seen other people indicate that DNN is no longer a framework for the hobby developer; this move seems to bear that out.

Congrats Shaun!

As a treat to myself for the new office move, I strategically ordered 2GB of RAM for my laptop so it would arrive on the first day in the new office. My Dell Latitude D610 has been a nice work horse for a while, but the paultry 512KB RAM just had a hard time compiling large VS.Net solutions.

I eagerly printed out the memory install instructions and patiently waited for the DHL driver to show up with my package. By using the DHL online tracking tool, I could see the package arrived in Portland on Friday and the driver had it by 9:25AM on Monday. Around 4PM, I couldn't wait anymore and I was being to wear a path in the carpet past the front desk; so I called the DHL line. They had a very good call system in place. I typed in my tracking code and the live person on the phone answered my question quickly. Basically, they knew exactly where they were delivering the package and no problems were reported. Drat!

Then, my (new) phone rang! It was the front desk calling to inform me that my package had arrived at the front desk. Figures, as soon as I call, the dude walks off the elevator to the office. I should have called a noon!

So, as my first feat of strength, I fired up VS.Net and pointed it to a DotNetNuke v4.3.4 solution that we have in the works. With just 512KB of RAM in my laptop, it took several minutes to compile the entire source code comprised of many thousands of lines. Now, with 2GB of RAM, I slammed through those 33 projects in about two minutes. A marked improvement indeed!

At just a measely 2GHz, my CPU is the dog now; the image of my task manager window bears that out. This is the processor churning through all those lines of DotNetNuke code in VS.Net; at least its not pegged at 100%! 

The holidays are coming soon, perhaps I'll see a new laptop soon? :)

I picked up a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 4 from Wrox Press yesterday. Chapter one was so interesting, I couldn't put it down. It was quite fortunate that I started reading it, given my earlier troubles the same day with iTunes.

The first chapter is by Shaun Walker and he paints a really interesting picture of the history of the product, some if his biggest mistakes, strokes of luck and gems of wisdom he discovered along the way. Its a very interesting chapter and I highly recommend, if not require, reading it if your involved at any level with DNN.

I admit that I've been a little disappointed with some features in DNN. Perhaps I've been swayed by some nay sayers, but after reading that rah-rah chapter, I'm back on board. I feel its an outstanding product for its niche. I'm sure other applications can fit similar niches quite well, but to be sure, DNN does what it says, very well. I'm sure that I'll also pursue a custom WCM route at the same time for a variety of reasons, but I sure do appreciate all that DNN does.

If you're waffling on using DNN, here are next questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Are you susceptible to the Not-Invented-Here syndrome?
2. Does XHTML 1.0 mean that much to you over HTML 4.01?
3. Are you willing to work with an existing framework, including its constraints, or to you think your time is better spent creating a new framework, with new constraints?
4. Are you planning on using any of the core modules, commercial modules, or custom built modules?

Here are some interesting points I learned in the first chapter:

1. Page 15 - DNN is ADA and Section 508 compliant
2. Page 24 - DNN was a mere 15K lines early on, ballooned to 46K lines, and now is well over that metric
3. Page 31 - DNN found its way into Fortune 500 companies, the military, goverment websites, and international vendors
4. Page 31 - DNN has over 30 language packs, now that's local!
5. Page 33 - A important part of DNN 3.0 was the inclusion of Forum, Blog and Gallery modules
6. Page 36 - Hosting companies integrated DNN offerings into SW-Soft (Plesk), WebHostAutomation (Helm), and Ensim
7. Page 37 - DNN will happily run on a web farm
8. Page 40 - When DNN 3.1 was released, the core team believed it will be some time before DNN can be considered a market leader in Content Management offerings
9. Page 48 - In November, 2005 they had 200,000 registered users. They currently have over 350,000.
10. Page 49 - By the end of 2005, www.dotnetnuke.com had achieved an impressive Alexa ranking of 6,741 and a SourceForge.Net ranking of #75 out of all open source projects.

I heard that DNN 4.3.5 is due out shortly. Its a stabilization release, so don't look for new features. Kelly submitted a bug fix to them yesterday and was concerned about the complexity. I can imagine the core team is so close to the system that they can't see the difficultly that new recruits would have in understanding this organization and contributing. I told Kelly that perhaps he and I can write a Wrox Press book on how to contribute to the DNN source!