Entries for August 2014

Just over six weeks ago Shaun published a blog called “DNN Labs: Project MaVeriCk”, where he indicated that we had initiated a project to look at supporting ASP.NET MVC development in DNN. I have spent about 25% of my time over the last six weeks on this project. There are really two objectives to Project MaVeriCK:

1. Can we create a completely new MVC based Platform that will enable us to move forward on future versions of ASP.NET?
2. Can we enable developers to create Modules using ASP.NET MVC today that will work within the current DNN Platform?

You may have ready my article on the death of ASP.net WebForms. Along came MVC to provide a new solution. 

I'll explain why ASP.net MVC started well but was overtaken by the internet, and why the resulting good solution is still called MVC, even though it's not Model-View-Controller. Our goal is to focus our time and energy on the relevant parts and ignore the rest.

As you might have heard, you have to migrate to Razor soon. Old-school developers have a hard time understanding why WebForms should be replaced, since it's worked to well for more than 10 years. So in this part 3 of my Series The Future of DNN Speaks Razor, I'll explain why WebForms turned out to be the wrong solution for web development and how the web changed to make WebForms' strengths obsolete.

One of the great aspects of being an Open Source platform is that we have an entire community of people who love helping their fellow community members.  This is one of the aspects of DNN that has attracted a lot of people to the platform and the community over the last decade.  One of the best ways to help others is by sharing your knowledge of DNN, ASP.Net and even Microsoft Azure. Imagine how awesome it would be to help educate other community members while also getting to spend some time at a warm Florida beach in the middle of Winter. Instead of shoveling the sidewalk, you could be relaxing in the sun.

If you could add one feature to DNN what would it be? What bug is at the top of your wish list that you would like to get fixed in the next release? Is there some documentation you would like to see improved? Do you ever wonder why certain decisions are made for the platform or the community? What if I said that you can add that feature, or get that bug fixed, or help improve the documentation?

Over the last 2 weeks I have had a chance to speak to a lot of community members. I heard over and over again that people want to have more visibility into what is happening with the project.  People want to help in developing the platform. People want to get involved to help solve many of the community and platform problems, both big and little. In short people want to participate in the development and management of the platform and community.

If you're an old-school DNN developer you're used to using ASP.net Forms - and you've developed tricks and techniques to compensate for various issues like clean SEO-HTML, JavaScript-Control-IDs and more. You've also implemented 3rd party controls (like a Telerik Grid) and spent hours of your time trying to compensate for certain shortcomings. Well, it turns out that this is not necessary any more - but most DNN-dudes don't realize this yet. Because the future is in absolute HTML control - using Razor. Let me tell you why, and how to get started. 

 This is part 1 of the Series The Future of DNN Speaks Razor. In this post I'll explain why you have to migrate now.