Tonight was the last on-line core team chat before we go live with DNN 2.0 Beta I. It was well attended… better than usual… even by folks in time zones where normal people are sleeping. But then we are not normal people… [interpretation purposefully left open *wink*]
Here is a brief (?) summary of our 2 ½ hour conversation as it relates to the community.
~ STAYING ON TARGET!
Even we have to discuss this amongst ourselves once in a while. The temptation to enhance and tweak and look toward the next release is too great. But with 5 days to Beta I release we still have some big things to knock down in addition to some big ticket bugs in our issue list. Beta I will be released with several known defects… as beta software often is… but they will be cleaned up prior to general release. Among those known defects, the Access DataProvider will not be released until Beta II; the PA Uninstaller will not be finished until Beta II; as of today there are big things to fix related to Vendors/Vendor Management, Search and User Defined Tables. A complete list of known issues will be published at the time of (or with) the release. Scope of version 2.1 will not be open for discussion until version 2.0 reaches Beta II.
~ Option Strict and Standards
Seems the cobblers’ son never has any shoes. But we need them before our feet get raw… Thanks primarily to Geert, DNN 2.0 Beta I will be delivered with Option Strict turned ON! Having eliminated literally 000’s of errors and warnings… there is a high degree of likelihood that some castings or resolutions to late binding issues will introduce minor bugs. Additionally… there’s going to be more than a few developers out there who don’t use Option Strict that are going to learn about some issues in their own core mods. But mostly, we have reached a point where project standards are no longer a nice thing to have… they are a “must have”. This is popping up in all kinds of threads including project & solution configuration, namespaces, casing, dataprovider interfaces, skinning rules, *.dnn format for PA’s, inline code commenting, etc. Consistency needs to be more easily (both) encouraged and enforced. There will be a push during the beta period to try and codify some of these things… but the communities help is going to be required.
~ Issue Reporting for the Beta
We have a new tool. Thanks to a generous software donation from Red-Gate Software and hosting provided by PortalWebHosting, the DotNetNuke team will be working with Aardvark. We considered opening access to this tool, but we feel it important to spend some time with it ourselves to better understand it’s potential and refine our configuration. We will use our GotDotNet repository for all publicly submitted issues during the beta period. Josh & Scott M will be monitoring and updating both the GDN Bug Tracker and Aardvark. Internally, the team will be learning to use Aardvark and we will see where it goes from there. Our Beta downloads will also be available from GDN so it will remain our primary support presence until further notice.
~ Publicizing Releases
DotNetNuke enjoys a pretty strong and pretty loyal following (thanks to all). The 2.0 Beta release is a landmark milestone and we are looking for ways to extend our “press release” through various channels. All “official” releases will come directly from the DotNetNuke site, although those releases may then be freely distributed.
~ Beta Release Schedule
Beta I will be released on February 14, 2004. Internally, we are working with a hard code freeze at 12:01 am GMT-8 (PST), February 13, 2004. This will provide 24 hours for cleanup and packaging of the release. Our next release, Beta II, is scheduled for 3 weeks later, March 6, 2004. Although we considered a shorter period, we believe it impractical to get the release out, get feedback, and fix bugs (in addition to the known defects) in any period shorter than this. No specific release date is being confirmed beyond Beta II at this time, though it will be largely a function of community feedback based on the Beta II release.
~ Private Beta Test Planning
If you haven’t received an invitation yet… don’t fret, they have not gone out yet. However we have finished our internal discussions and are very excited about having quite a few fresh faces diligently working over the release. Expect these to go out within the next couple of days and for us to then publish a list of “official” DNN 2.0 Beta testers in forum. Phil Beadle and I will be coordinating this effort for Shaun.
~ PA (Private Assembly) Installer
This little gem gets more complex every day… but it is an amazing piece of software and we believe it is key for DotNetNukes’ future (kudos to Joe Brinkman and to Jonathan de Halleux on whose PA Gold installer it was originally based). Some of the discussion was around transactional support… which will be supported in Beta I. So if you have a module with multiple database entries to process, it either succeeds or fails as a transaction, thus supporting a complete rollback rather than a broken install. There are two main difficulties with this for us to consider. First, there are lots of v 1.x PA’s out there with SQL that generates warnings/errors which would kill a transaction… So in order to ensure v1.x compatibility (without changes), there will be no transactional support for v1.x PA’s but it will be in effect for v2.x PA’s. Vendors of v1.x PA’s may wish to repackage to utilize the new *.dnn format, but it will not be required. The second issue is transactional support in various dataproviders (e.g. Access & mySQL). The PA Installer will support syntax in the SQL file which will nullify errors/warnings (e.g. {ignoreerrors}). Since this file is parsed by the uploader, it can execute those statements outside of the transaction making it possible for dataproviders which do not have transactional support to work.
~ Miscellaneous Items on the Issues List
There are a number of big ticket items which still need work. Some of these are impacted because they were never working particularly well in the 1.x version and now, with the abstraction of the dataproviders and the BLL, the problems are more obvious. There is work to do on Vendors, particularly with the service directory. Search functionality is also not working fully. It is generally agreed that new search functionality is needed… but that current functions must be working as they did before until a future solution can be addressed. Current logic employed in search may not be usable for all dataproviders. RSS Feeds also need work, the 1.x method was not reusable. For Beta I or II, the original method will be restored but a more general method will be devised… this has been on our roadmap for a while and is waiting in the wings. Mobile functions have been removed from 2.0 since, again, they were not working well (even at all, out of the box) in the 1.x version. There is still some mobile code to be cleaned out of the project. Mobile will be added back into DNN at some point in the future… when a better implementation can be devised. Can anyone say Whidbey?
And so, there you have it. 2 ½ hours of core team chit chat. And before the 2.0 Beta I release… a few last words.
DotNetNuke 2.0 Coming Soon! 2/10/2004 2:47 AM
DotNetNuke 2.0 Core Team Chat Feb 09, 2004 2/10/2004 8:11 AM
mrswoop's DotNetNuke 2.0 update 2/10/2004 10:41 AM
re:A Few Last Words 4/10/2005 6:44 AM
^_^,Pretty Good!