Last month I did a 3 day speaking tour of .Net and DNN User Groups in Florida. It was a great trip but one of the painful lessons I learned from that trip was that Florida is not just the home of millions of senior citizens: it is also the home of trillions of mosquitos. I came home from that trip looking like I had a bad case of chicken pox. The other lesson I learned was that Floridians love DNN and they have very passionate community members.
In just over a week, the DNN community will converge on West Palm Beach for this fall’s DNNCon. This conference is a great opportunity to network with DNN experts and learn firsthand from the some of the best developers, designers and administrators in the DNN community. There are speakers coming from all over North America and Europe to share their expertise with other passionate members of our amazing community. If you are attending just remember to bring your bug repellent.
We are currently in the final stages of getting DNN 7.2.0 ready for release. We have another month to finish working on this release and then we’ll be ready to ship. One of our goals for DNN 7.2.0 has been to increase the level of community participation in our development process. With the recent changes to our issue tracker and source control system, it is now easier than ever for community members to contribute.
As I was looking at the calendar a couple months ago, I realized that DNNCon was going to occur during the last couple of weeks of our development cycle. This is usually the time when we focus on stabilizing the release, closing out as many issues as we can, and doing our final QA checks. And then it struck me: At DNNCon we will have hundreds of community members and an untold number of bugs all in one place. What a perfect opportunity to enlist our community to help stamp out bugs.
At DNNCon, DNN Corp will be sponsoring a community bug bash. This is your opportunity to get involved and help improve the platform that we all love. Do you have a bug that you want to see fixed? Join us at the bug bash and submit a pull request. Are you interested in ensuring that DNN 7.2 is as stable as possible? Do some testing, log a bug, and submit a fix.
During the bug bash DNN Corp will have engineers and product managers standing by ready to assist. We’ll review your bugs and your pull requests and streamline the process to get them into the 7.2.0 release. The goal is to close as many bugs as we can before the close of the conference.
Everyone who submits a valid bug fix* for a new or existing bug will be entered into a drawing for a brand new Microsoft Surface 2 64Gb tablet**. For all of you people who are not going to be at DNNCon, don’t worry. You don’t need to be present to participate or win. Just submit a pull request any time before 3PM EST on October 19th.
One of the strengths of the DNN Platform is our amazing community of users, developers and designers. Join me at DNNCon and help make DNN 7.2.0 one of our most stable releases ever.
[UPDATE: 10/17/2013]
One thing I need to clarify is that any valid bug fix that is submitted for 7.2 prior to the cutoff time on Saturday will qualify for the giveaway. You do not need to be present to enter and you do not need to wait until DNNCon starts to begin submitting fixes. It would be great if everyone would take a few minutes this week to find one of the many bugs that is logged in Jira and submit a pull request with the code to fix it. Or create a new bug based on the Beta release that we recently announced. It could be a coding issue, or a CSS issue, or fixing (or adding) XML comments to code or even fixing documentation. You do not have to be a programmer to be able to submit a contribution.
* All submitted bug fixes will be reviewed by DNNCorp for validity. Submitters will have the opportunity to correct and resubmit fixes as long as the final fix is received prior to the cutoff. All bug fixes must follow the official DNN Platform contribution procedures.
** Microsoft won’t begin shipping tablets until October 21st. We will ship out the tablet to the winner as soon as we are able.