If you weren’t aware, I just visited a few events in Florida to spread the word about DotNetNuke and DNN World 2012. The events included Tampa#, FLA.Net West Palm Beach .Net, and the Southwest Florida Code Camp. These events were all very cool. The organizers did an outstanding job amidst a pending tropical storm and a hurricane, illness, and the always challenging logistics of a code camp. There were 5 sessions in all, and in each of them, I promised resources from the session. The wait is over… Here are the resources from the sessions.
Thanks to the Event Organizers
Before I get to the resources, I just want to thank the organizers of these events for doing such a great job. Robert Venables did a fantastic job putting together the Tampa# meeting. He had to scramble to find a venue, and it was a great one. And it’s always a plus to me when a user group meeting has bottled water. Not many do, and Robert made sure that this meeting had some. Bonus!
The leader of the West Palm Beach user group, Sam Abraham, was not only dealing with a tropical storm literally closing our venue, but he was too sick to even get to work and somehow managed to move the venue and get the attendees there without a hitch. Of course, Applied Innovations stepped in to cover the costs of not only the food and drinks, but the cost of renting the new venue room. All of this was literally done in hours!
John Dunagan and his team did an incredible job of organizing and execute the Southwest Florida Code Camp. Of course, I would expect nothing less of these folks. Not only are they some of the nicest people you’d meet, but they are incredibly passionate members of the Microsoft community.
Now for the session resources…
DotNetNuke Makes Your Websites and Web Applications SOCIAL
In this session, I gave a brief overview of DNN and its social features from a high level. Then, I showed how you can easily integrate with its social features to create socially enabled web applications. I gave this presentation 3 times, so the 3 slide decks are listed below. Click the download link for your event, but know that they are only redistributable in PDF format due to the licensing of some of the artwork.
The code I used to demonstrate these features was in the Media Module. However, the release is not ready for prime time just yet. In the meantime, you can find the code used in the source code on Codeplex.
Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development
This is a session that a lot of people have done a lot of times – myself included. I haven’t done this session in a long time, so I decided to take a new spin on it. I used the new module templates by Chris Hammond, and I showed how you can use the ContentItems feature in the DNN API to have a DAL-less module.
The first version of the module that I used was literally built in a couple of hours. However, after the session I went through the code and refactored the data being saved into ContentItems, as well as added a lot more comments in the source code.
Using Open Graph Protocol in DotNetNuke & Intercepting Page Requests
This session had two goals for me… First, I wanted to show the value of and how to use Open Graph Protocol. Second, I wanted to highlight in several places how I was saving time, effort, and simply writing better code by re-using portions of the DNN API. This was perhaps my favorite session that I gave during this trip.
The module I demonstrated in this session was not new. In fact, the first release was January of this year. However, when I was preparing for this session, I noticed how incredibly BAD my code looked. I spent most of the time on the flight to Southwest Florida Code Camp refactoring and fully commenting the code. This was a good thing, because it also allowed me to add some caching to the module.
This blog entry is cross-posted from my personal blog site.