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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.

I'm staring at my monitor with empty editor window open trying to come up with words to describe what has just happened. 3 days of being caught in some kind of whirlwind. Smiles and hugs, presentations, discussions, eating and drinking. And more discussions. And more drinking. And more discussions. And lots of laughing. And then it all slowly evaporates and we each make our way home. How to write down something that remotely approaches the experiences of those 3 days? Here's an attempt.

There is some confusion about the poster sessions we will have at DNN Connect 2015. I’ll try to elaborate on what we had in mind for this part of the conference. The idea was borne out of the fact that we wanted to cut back on the “product presentation” sessions we normally have in the conference. Many of you have great projects you are working on and traditionally our conference has been a vehicle to present those projects to your peers. But this year there is a lot to talk about regarding the technological changes at Microsoft and around DNN. So we’re going to experiment with a different format.

We are thrilled to announce the program for DNN Connect 2015. This year we have taken a more active approach to content and have attempted to drive it with focus on two main themes: DNN 8 and neXt/asp.net vNext and mobile. There is a lot of noise around the changes that are happening at asp.net and DNN. Basically asp.net is being rewritten from the ground up and we can expect that some features that DNN uses will no longer be available to us. In part these changes are informed by “the mobile era” that we can ill afford to ignore. To make sense of all this we are very excited that Microsoft have agreed to send a speaker from their own asp.net team and we will welcome Eilon Lipton in our midst for this event. Together with DNN’s chief architect Charles Nurse you will have access to the very people that are shaping these changes.

Over the past few days I’ve put together a module that implements yet another showcase. “Showcase”, here is similar to what the “Forge” does on the official DNN site. Why would I do this? Good question. What provoked it initially, was the upcoming DNN Connect 2015 conference and my desire to allow people to “showcase” their work/ideas. What I had in mind was what we dubbed “poster sessions”. Basically the ability to put up a poster on a wall in a predetermined format. Now we could just say: OK people, “you can bring an A2 poster to the event and we’ll put it up” but then we’re going to get all kinds of formats (some have more time and creativity in this respect than others). So to level the playing field I was thinking: what if we had a database that could flow into a PDF template?

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.

Everyone who has opened up the event log in DNN has undoubtedly been struck by the fact that there is a lot of information there. The event log is like a huge bin into which the platform and modules can drop anything they wish to log. To help you navigate the flood of information we use color coding and filters. This will allow you to answer questions like “User X had an error when they went to page Y. What happened?” You’d probably want to know when user X had this experience as the log is basically just a chronological list of events. But the event log is not able to answer the question “Who else had this error?” and “Is this error recurring often?” The event log was simply not designed to answer those questions. To address this, I’ve made a few changes to the framework which I’ll elaborate on.

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.

With version 7.3.3 of the DNN Platform a new “localization feature” has been implemented: list localization. Lists are a core platform feature whereby users can maintain lists that other bits of software can maintain. There are several lists that come out-of-the-box when you install DNN (see “Lists” table in SQL). The most visible ones are countries and regions. But there are also currencies and frequencies, plus a whole bunch of lists that tell DNN how to run things (i.e. they allow us to configure particular bits). The new feature means that what you will see in the front end of DNN can adapt to the language of the user viewing it.