Birds Of a Feather: DotNetNuke 4.0

Well let me start with a quick blub about my adventures last night at the birds of a feather meeting at 9PM in the food hall. The session started off on a bad note when Shawn Walker, creator and leader of DotNetNuke didn’t show up. He was in New York for the open source conference. Steve Fabien, the Core Project lead of the Document and Repository modules stepped up to lead the discussion despite being promised he wouldn’t have to speak.

So an agenda was set and the first topic was support. This is where I’ll give the short version. Basicall the discussion was dominated by a Noreigen DNN developer who was hoping to use DNN to offer schools in his country to setup web sites and offer student each personal sites. He seemed to be worry about support only to later retract that support wasn’t and issue. This led to a discussion about money not being an issue either and that schools in his country can get SharePoint for $50. I really don’t even know what he was deabating, for $50 a school DNN isn’t in the running with the new SharePoint. After using up most of the time I pushed to move ahead with the agenda. My main question about Activy Directory support was answered with an explination of the source code was dontated, it was converted to work as part of the core and then the original creator who was supposed to be the lead for the project on the core disappeared and can’t seem to be contacted. In talking to another person earlier in the day I did learn that perhaps it’d be better to look at some of the 3^rd party AD modules that might work better if need be.

Testing and Refactoring Your Database with Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals

This session was the second is the series, its main focus was on the features it offers for testing. Data Generation can be done for all SQL value types as well as a few complex types like foreign keys, regular expressions, and data bound (dictionary look up from another table). Futher more they will be able to create value distributions that are unfirom, normal, inverse normal, exponensial and inverse exponential. And when the RTM ships they will have an option allowing you to create a historgram from your production data and they will conform the generated data to that historgram.

Unit Testing looks pretty easy to setup and yet is very powerful if you want to add custom code to perform tests. Basically you have a SQL script that executes all of your conditions including assertions, rowsets, row count and execution time. You then define the expected result for each of the statements in the script.

In the deployment of a database project is the ability to generate test data, and perform tests to make sure the deployment didn’t break anything. Finally they talked about the refactoring feature.

In this first version of the product, the only refactoring functionality that will be offered will be the rename feature. Since the project knows the entire database schema they will be able to rename all object references, direct and indirect inside of all tables, views, stored procs, triggers, user defined function, data generation plans, scripts, and database unit tests.

Vistual Studio Team Foundation Server, Part 1

This session went over the work flow for work items. This is the part of the TFS that allows for team member collaboration on projects. The highlights are the ability to edit the project file information in both Excel and Project (for scheduling) and information is all stored into a project web site (based on sharepoint). TFS is built from the ground up as a new product. It’s built on Sql Server 2005 for full database storage of souce items. Check in can be enforeced by policys which define rules such as requiring each check in to be associated with a work item or having been code reviewed by a peer. Shelving is probably one of the most powerful new features. A set of changes can be “shelved” into TFS. This shelf can then be checked out by another team member to see the changes that were made in that shelf. If that co-worker has been making their own modification there is no confliect as they are maintain in separate bracnhes in the source control system. So if team member B is having problem with their code, they can shelf it. Team member A can shelf their own current work in any state its in to check out Team member Bs shelf to help work on it. When he’s done he can return to his own changes. There is also a lot of repoting functionality for managing project status. Managers need not constently ask developers for status updates as the true project staus can always be determed by the project web site or reports.

Converting to VS2005 Web Apps – Web Application Project (WAP)

This session was supposed to be on migrating code from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. However it got renamed and focused only on ASP.NET migration. This was diapointing as I don’t think ther process is that complicated. I did learn there was a little more than running the wizard to full migrate a web project to 2.0. However, the speaker was going at a very slow pace explaing in slides each details step vs just showing the demo and explaining it. Once he finished the steps I left to work on the SSIS import.

The main point from this session is that its’ the recommendation to migrate to the new (SP1 or download plugin) ASP.NET Web Application Project vs. the ASP.NET Web Site that was the new development mode when VS2005 was released. However the reason to do the migration are based on each application and require an analysis on a project by project basis for ROI.