Snowball - The Blog

Lately, I have been doing a lot of projects with Dotnetnuke. I first started using it for my own use, but lately, I have used it to create some large portal sites for some of our customers.

To start with, let me first introduce Dotnetnuke (DNN). The very first sentence on the DNN homepage states the following: DotNetNuke is an Open Source Framework ideal for creating Enterprise Web Applications.

Let’s analyze this sentence, shall we? For starters, it’s a framework that you can use out-of-the-box to set up a portal site. Included in the download package are a number of modules that are sufficient to build an entire portal. Modules included vary from a simple HTML module to an entire forum and an image gallery. Of course, these are not enough to build an entire enterprise application. But DNN is very versatile, and so for every need, new modules can be build.
Since it’s an open-source project, it’s easy to tweak the framework where needed, to meet the needs of the application you are designing with it.

Sometimes, if an web-application is needed very fast, nothing comes close to use a portal framework like DNN. Lately, I have built the new Visug (Visual Studio User Group: www.visug.be ) site with DNN. We needed a site quickly, and DNN brought us the solution.
Some people I met are skeptical towards the use of DNN. The main concerns are mostly speed, reliability and not being in control. Personally, I admit that sometimes the latter can be true. I have had some problems with included features that are hard to override or undo. But since it’s open-source, I have been able to conquer them all.

One little thing, though. DNN is written in VB.net (the core and the core modules, that is). If you’re like me and you don’t program in VB.net, but still want to develop modules, you can do so in C#! Since Visual Studio 2005, it’s not a problem to have a solution with VB.net and C# files. Should you require to modify some core settings, you’ll have to write your code in VB.net, however.

So, now that I have been using DNN for several large projects, I have decided to share my knowledge on it via a series of articles.

In the first article, I will discuss how to install DNN and create the first portal with it. In the articles to come, I will show you how to create a module, how to skin the portal and how to extend DNN to use it to create full enterprise applications where DNN is used in a SOA environment. Stay tuned!