Entries for 'Joe Brinkman'

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. – Phil Karlton

This is one of my favorite quotes regarding computer science. Currently I find myself facing a challenge that involves both of these issues – Is DNN 7.5 the right name for the next major release of DNN? If we change the name how do we invalidate everyone's "internal memory cache" so that we don't cause confusion?

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A large part of life is about making choices. We make hundreds of decisions every day. Whether it is a mundane decision like what to eat for breakfast, or a life altering decision like whether to get married. For computer geeks like me it might be whether to use VB or C#, or whether to write my web app using Web Forms or MVC. Many of the choices we make in life are outward expressions of who we are. We often make choices not for any logical reason, but because of some emotional feeling that we have. Why does one developer prefer C# while another developer prefers Java?

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Today I am happy to announce that DNN 7.4 has been released. Over the last 12 years I have been involved with well over 100 releases and for me 7.4 is near the top of the list of releases that I am most proud of. I am proud of this release because of the way the community rallied around the platform. The community played a huge role in implementing fixes and features. The community continuously reviewed code check-ins and provided timely feedback and fixes where necessary. Even as we approached the release and started locking down the code, the community moved forward with work on fixes and enhancements for 7.4.1 and 7.5. As of today, we already have a backlog of 40+ pull requests which will give us a good head-start on our next release.

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If I were to ask you who your favorite super hero was, who would you choose? Would you pick the Man of Steel, your friendly neighborhood Spider Man, or maybe the Dark Knight? Might you choose a group of heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers or the Justice League? Some of you might pick a real life sports hero like Michael Jordan, Joe Montana or Pelé. Or maybe you would pick a great leader like Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa or Lech Wałęsa. All of these superheroes, both real and imagined are known for their amazing skills and their willingness to serve others.

One of the aspects of working on an Open Source project is that I am surrounded every day by people who exhibit these same traits. I think of the many nights and weekends that DNN community members spend working to build and improve the DNN platform that we all know and love. These community members bring their many unique talents to bear, solving programming problems both big and small. For me, as a programmer, these people are some of my heroes.

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Each month Will Strohl and I talk about the latest happenings in the DNN community. This month we are focusing on the new DNN 7.4.0 Platform release which is set to be released on February 4th. Joining us this month will be special guests Brian Dukes and Francesco Rivola.

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Over the last 6 months a quiet revolution has been occurring in the DNN Community. Last fall I asked the community to join me in charting a new course for how we build and maintain DNN Platform. Since that time community members have been joining in to help with the development and maintenance of the platform. They are also working to improve the content on the community site, creating original blogs and videos and otherwise just helping to educate and grow the community.

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I am pleased to announce that the DNN Platform 7.4.0 beta is now available for download. This release has been a labor of love by the entire community and I want to personally thank all those community members who contributed to help get this release ready. We are in the final couple of weeks and will only be making changes for any truly show stopping issues (i.e. unable to create pages, login, edit content etc.). Read the post for a summary of what is included in this release.

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Join Will Strohl and I each month as we talk about the latest happenings in the DNN community. Every month we feature a new community guest who talk's to us about how to get the most out of DNN. Whether it is site administration, module development or building cutting edge DNN skins, there is always plenty of great content for everyone.

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In the last five months, I have been focused on changing the DNN community culture to become much more collaborative in how we build and manage the DNN Platform. Part of the challenge was to create an environment that fostered community participation and that promoted community involvement in platform development. A key part of this effort has been to focus on scaling the Pull Request process so that community members felt empowered to submit code fixes and enhancements to the platform. We have removed many of the barriers in our processes so that now most pull requests are processed within days or hours of being submitted.

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I am pleased to announce that DNN Platform 7.3.4 has been released. The 7.3.4 release is a stabilization release. DNN 7.3.4 is a smaller maintenance release than normal and is focused on addressing the most serious platform issues. It is expected that this will be the final platform release prior to DNN 7.4.0 which is expected to be released in January 2015. Once again the community has provided a number of significant fixes for this release. I look forward to increasing this level of participation coming in future releases.

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