Beta 2 Continued...

IMC - the inter-module communication feature has been added back and improved for Beta 2 ( special thanks to Mark Hoskins and Todd Mitchell ).

Exception Handling - the XML publisher for global exception handling has been improved in a number of ways ( special thanks to Dan Caron ). It now logs to an exceptions.vb file which is protected by ASP.NET from remote download.

CSS - Beta 1 code would include references to the various cascading CSS files even if they did not exist on the server. This has been enhanced to only include valid CSS references.

Caching - all caching logic has been centralized in a shared Components/DataCache.vb class which provides simple methods for cache management. A change was made to use HttpRuntime.Cache rather than Context.Cache - this resolves issues with web services, etc...

Performance - the skin assignments for tabs and module containers are now being stored in the cache with the other portal settings. This reduces the number of database calls on each request significantly. A number of other high frequency database calls have also been optimized to improve application performance. We are now using DataTables as a cache storage container rather than Datasets which should result in a slight performance gain. The ConvertDataReaderToDataSet helper method has been optimized as well.

Personalization - there is now an integrated personalization data store which module developers can use to add personalization features to their modules. Look in the shared Components/Personalization.vb class for details on the simple API.

Default.aspx - the DesktopDefault.aspx page has now been replaced with Default.aspx. This is more consistent with ASP.NET standards and reduces the chance of hackers targeting sites in Google which contain DesktopDefault in the URL.

Crawlers - view state has been moved to the bottom of the page to allow for better search engine optimization.

Base Class - added a new UserId property to the DesktopPortalModules base class. This provides for type safe access to the current user identity.