As a person that has either directly written or managed the creation of over 400 custom DotNetNuke extensions in the past few years, the DotNetNuke package process is still the one item that I will at times overlook. Well, recently DotNetNuke released a utility to help those of us looking to ensure that our extensions meet all of the proper requirements for consistent installation.
This service was first announced by Nathan Rover on the DotNetNuke.com blog. The service is called EVS (Extension Verification Service) and it is fully web based. When you first go to the site you will see the following screen:
From here the process is quite simple, select your DotNetNuke installer file and upload. The system will then go through and review all of the items that are outlined in Nathan's post that I linked above. The final results will look similar to the following, (I removed the package name for confidentiality).
From here you can see that any errors are listed, as well as warnings on if you are missing any critical parts of the manifest, for example the "Minimum Version" which is something I've mentioned in previous posts is important is one of the key items. If you are distributing extensions to an audience I would recommend that you use this service prior to sending out any package, as it will help you make sure that your extension will work the best in all situations. I know I've incorporated this as a key part of our development cycle.
This post was Cross Posted to my Personal Blog