Core Team Mtg. Notes (4/15/10)

Announcements

• Shaun travelling today so unable to make this meeting.  Among other things, catching up with our friends at telerik.
• Joe is in Abbotsford today working with the Engineering team on the DNN 5.4 release.
• DNN Connections speaker selections are in progress and expect to be determined on Monday.

Engineering Update

• Some infrastructure issues hindered progress this week.  Our source control has served us amazingly well for the last few years but for some reason it hiccupped this week and pushed us into early evaluation of TFS that we had not planned to undertake quite yet.  Ultimately a TFS transition is really the best thing for us, but the impact was unexpected.
• The core team should have a preliminary 5.4 build available to them today.
• One of the items which slowed 5.4 release was one that had the potential to be a security issue if not addressed, logging of unencrypted sensitive information in the message store.  So this has been addressed and will probably also be enhanced further in 5.4.1.
• Education is going to be required for developers in terms of how to appropriately use the core messaging store for items that should be considered “secure”.
• The 5.4 release is directed primarily at ASP.Net 4.0 release compatibility, so not as many new features as might be expected in a minor version release.  The dev cycle for the release was really only about 2 weeks long.

Some Questions & Misc Items

• With bringing in TFS, will Gemini go away?  There are some issues around using TFS in a public facing manner like we do with Gemini.  So although converting to TFS might serve us internally, Gemini will be around until a solution appropriate for use and participation with the community can be determined.
• Will the team be switching to VS2010?  Internally (at DNN Corp) we will be switching to VS2010 development post 5.4 release.  The team can continue to use VS2008, but checkins to source control must be made with VS2010 to avoid version conflicts caused by VS incompatibility.
• Expect to be seeing some new faces in the forums and blogging.  Our Engineering & Products groups are setting internal measures for increased community participation by DNN Corp personnel (many of whom are new to our community)!

Module Project Updates

• Bill Severance has an updated version of the Gallery module that will have an RC on Codeplex shortly. This update deals with a significant legacy issue which surfaced during ASP.Net 4.0 compatibility testing.  Bill was gracious enough to stop everything and update the module so that it can be brought back into distribution in time for 5.4.1.
• Blog 4.0 is in the release tracker after a number of successful public rc’s.
• The Release Tracker process was originally conceived and developed by Steve Fabian, and conducted largely by myself and a few other folks.  For the last couple of years it has been managed primarily by Sebastian Leupold with substantial contribution from Matthias Schlomann, Timo Breumelhof, Stefan Cullmann, Joe Brinkman and myself.  While the process has had enormous historical contribution, it has been a fairly static process while the Forge environment has changed substantially.  The Health Team is undertaking the Blog module as a study for the apparent challenges in getting module updates released and considering alternative approaches to accomplishing these objectives in a changing Forge environment.
• Charles asks that all forge project leaders continue testing their modules under ASP.Net 4.0 for compatibility issues.

Community Initiatives Status

• User Group Wizard enhancements on track.
• Community Recognition Tracking in analysis.  Next on deck after User Group Wizard enhancements.
• Wiki in production being configured for team use.
• Blog RC tested on staging data, preparing for use on www.dotnetnuke.com following release.
• Any MVP candidates who need activity data can contact me for assistance.

New Business

• Deadline for EU DayofDotNetNuke speakers submissions Sunday.
• SDN DNN Connections event on track, info due later this month.
• Our next meeting will be conducted in Campfire!