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This is something of a pet peeve for me. And whenever I get myself involved in an open source project in DNN, it is one of the first things I’d tackle. The issue I’m referring to, here, is how to properly code settings that are serialized to storage (SQL). So settings are commonly retrieved as a hashtable or dictionary of key/value pairs that are both of a string type. These lists get stored in SQL typically in tables with the “Settings” suffix. I.e. ModuleSettings, PortalSettings, TabModuleSettings, etc. And often modules implement their own settings table because the framework hard wires ModuleSettings to … modules. So if you need portal-scoped settings for your module, you’ll need to create your own table. The old blog module (pre version 6) used to do this, for instance.

The roots of DNN are in Webforms. In the early days of asp.net this was Microsoft’s evolution of the Active Server Pages technology. Since then the world has moved on quite a bit. Various alternatives to Webforms have been introduced on the Winstack and by and large PHP has grown more explosively than any .net based technology. In part, because the php-based cms solutions have been kinder to web designers. How else to explain the vast amount of skins (themes) available to them and the general disdain of any web design firm for .net? OK. Maybe this is not entirely accurate, but the feeling I get is that we could make progress by making DNN more design-centric. And in my opinion that translates to: ensuring a designer has a better grip of where the HTML and CSS is coming from and where to change this.

To our second installment on this two part series on handlers and modules in ASP.NET web applications, their significance and how to begin debugging situations where things have gone haywire. Like I mentioned in the previous post on handlers: modules and handlers go together like peas and carrots. The main difference is the following: whereas a handler runs only when ASP.NET has decided it should handle the incoming request and ASP.NET stops after it has found the handler, the module always runs on every request and ASP.NET continues. So the way that looks is that upon a web request ASP.NET first passes the request to each and every module in the list of modules and then tries to find a handler for it and passes the request on. Most crucially a module can alter a request as it passes through it or set the stage for other components before they run. For the remainder of this post I assume you will have seen/read through the previous post and you are familiar with Fiddler, web requests a ...

This post is the first of a two part series about handlers and modules and is an attempt to offload what I know about handlers to you. Knowing what handlers are and how they work is what separates the savvy from the not-so-savvy when it comes to IIS administration. Although very few modules in the DotNetNuke ecosystem use/rely on handlers, those that do experience a steady stream of support calls along the lines of “hey, XYZ doesn’t work” and it is down to a handler issue. Examples of modules that use handlers are Ultra Video Gallery and Document Exchange. DotNetNuke uses handlers itself as well. So what is a handler? In a nutshell a handler is piece of code that handles a web request. To understand why it’s good to know more about this you need to look closer at http traffic (i.e. the bits and bytes that go back and forth between your browser and the server).

This article is about the use of templates in DotNetNuke modules, specifically the new Blog module. The aim is to provide some background to those interested as to why I chose the templating mechanism that I did. And how it works.