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As most of us are enjoying a summer break (I’m addressing the European crowd of course) we have the opportunity to rethink our work from the helicopter view of our deck chair sipping a well deserved Mojito. And many of us will undoubtedly at one point or other ponder on the future of .net, DNN and our ecosystem. We even devoted a whole conference to it this year. And it’s all still very much “work in progress” when you examine what is happening at Microsoft and DNN Corp. So are we really screwed or not? Is it five past twelve? Did we miss the bus? Should we have listened to our nephew telling us to get with the mainstream and go LAMP? Here are some random thoughts on the ongoing debate and single page applications (SPA) as modules.

This analogy jumped into my mind the other day. As a (DNN module) developer I feel somewhat like a cook. A cook, taking various ingredients and combining them into something hopefully very tasty. A cook, because we use other people’s work to create our own unique work. It is not just using .net and DNN as a platform that I’m talking about. Here I was thinking about the myriad of libraries and programming paradigms that I’ve used over the years.

Developers are migratory, herding animals. As new programming techniques, languages and paradigms emerge, we flock to new pastures and we eat and we eat and we eat … If you are in the DNN eco system you are led by Microsoft and DNN Corp. Meaning: if one of the two decides that we should do things differently, chances are you’ll move along with the rest. But as we move on we leave behind existing projects and customers. Generally they move a lot slower. Hands up those who still know someone on Windows XP! End users are not part of this herd. They live in a parallel universe from ours.

August 13th, 2014. I woke up in an alternate reality this morning. The reality where Shaun Walker was no longer with DNN Corp. It must have been all of 5 minutes between his resignation being made public and a message popping up on my iPad as I was preparing to go to bed. "It happened", it read. "It" being something the sender and I had discussed earlier as something that might happen in the near future. The third founder to leave the Corp and without doubt the most famous of all of them. And within an hour the interwebs were firing up with discussions about what this would mean for "us". Us, the DNN community that is. What do we make of this? At times like these I feel like we're Kremlin watchers. "Hey, so-and-so's now on the left instead of the right of the supreme leader at the parade. Did he get demoted?" So Shaun signs out with a short goodbye. And Joe posts a somewhat more elaborate post on how he intends to fill his shoes (Joe is now the o ...

In my earlier post I delved into how I got into DNN late 2002/early 2003. In this post I continue where I left off at the end of 2005.

It’s been over 10 years that I’ve been “on DNN” and 7 years that I’m on the so-called Core Team of the platform. I’ve been awarded MVP (Most Valuable Person) by DNN Corp. Time to look back at our history together. Warning: I set out to write a paragraph or two about becoming DNN MVP, but it has grown into somewhat of a complete retrospective of the last decade. It was roughly 10 years ago I discovered DotNetNuke. In this first part I look at how I discovered DNN and my introduction into the community.

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.

I can think of two reasons why you’d be a DNN Platform addict. Either you think it’s an awesome tool to make some money or you think you can make some money using this. I’m kidding. There is a second group. Those that itch to work on something bigger than they would otherwise be able to work on, together with some of the sharpest programming minds on the planet. Obviously I’m not excluding you’re here for both reasons. But the focus of this post is on the second group. Those that have been bitten by the Open Source bug.