Thoughts from Scott

C4C Recap

scott@n3bu1a.com — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:41:00 GMT

I've been meaning to write this post since Sunday evening, but things just kept getting in my way. This past weekend (10/16 – 10/18) I had the privilege to volunteer at Coders for Charities (C4C). Like I said in a previous post, I viewed this as an opportunity to use some skills and experience that I have built up over time to a community that has given me loads in return.

C4C (at least the way it was set up this year) was a 72 hour event where the geeks of St. Louis got together and cranked out some code for much deserving charities. This year, the majority of the participating charities needed website work. As a matter of fact, the majority of the site work was done using either SiteFinity and DotNetNuke.

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Getting the Browser to Recognize RSS Feeds

scott@n3bu1a.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:49:00 GMT

So very recently, I redesigned my site, which I now like, but will probably change it again in two months (it's my site thank you very much). When I redesigned my site, I left off the syndication button, which was the primary way to subscribe to my blog. This caused someone to reach out to me because they could not subscribe.

My site is powered by DotNetNuke, and I love this application/platform. It's flexible, (depending on what's installed) it's light, and it's easy to use (once you get used to a few things). One of the very few things that has irked me about DotNetNuke though, is if you syndicate a module (like a blog) the browser doesn't pick up on it. The majority of all the browsers now support Live Bookmarks, and the little RSS icon is one of the first things I look for when I come across a new feed.

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Coding 4 Charity

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:43:00 GMT

Real quick update on doing something for a really good cause.

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Social Media Class in Maryland Heights

scott@n3bu1a.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:01:56 GMT

A brief look at my first foray into teaching a class in my local community. It was quite fun if you don't want to read the post. :-)

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St. Louis Day of .Net

scott@n3bu1a.com — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:41:00 GMT

A quick hit of my DotNetNuke presentation at St. Louis's Day of .Net.

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MarketSTL Recap

scott@n3bu1a. com — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:22:00 GMT

Quick review of what I covered during my MarketSTL presentation on using Social Media Networks in Business.

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Oooh! SPAM Email!

scott@n3bu1a.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:37:42 GMT

Let me start off by saying that I love Gmail's Spam Filter. In the words of Tony the Tiger, "It's greeeaaat!" That said, I got my first piece of spam today that somehow made it through Gmail's filter.

Here is the content of the email:

新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします

新しいメールアドレス：mr_isaac_caleb1200@yahoo.co.jp

I am isaac caleb bank manager of BOA Bank in Burkina faso.I would like you to indicate your interest to receive the transfer of 10.5M Dollars.I will like you to stand as the next of kin to my late Descease customer whose account is presently dormant,for claim

Yours faithfully,

mr isaac caleb

- Mr Isaa a Caleb

Does this sound familiar? To me it sounds like the Nigerian schemes that went through the world a few years back. I only think this because Gmail's spam filter made sure that crap never reached me.

Anyway, in case anyone is wondering I regard this as spam because:

If I'm a bank employee, I'm not sending my bank related emails through Yahoo!
If I'm going to send email from a Japanese address, why am I going to use an Anglo name?
Most importantly… WHY IS SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW OFFERING ME A LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY???!!

Anyway, this email has now my made my day. What's your favorite spam messages?

Social Media Thoughts

scott@n3bu1a. com — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:50:00 GMT

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Overriding the Base Skin Object in DotNetNuke

scott@n3bu1a.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:35:49 GMT

Today, I was presented with an interesting problem. How can you use the same content for two different website, but account for some very minor changes in your DotNetNuke skin? After thinking about it for a little bit, I decided to override the base Skin class. Turns out, with an RESX or XML file, this is a pretty darn elegant solution.

First, let's take a look at the code. In order to do this properly, the class being created needs to inherit from DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin. This enables the class to pick up all of the appropriately used public properties and methods and provides the ability to add overridden/custom properties. In my particular case, the driving force behind the customization in the skin development was the URL name. I probably could use any PortalSetting (name, ID, etc), but I chose to go with the URL. It's easy enough to get. Here's what my code started off looking like:

public class MySkinDefault : DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin
{

public MySkinDefault()

{

}

At this point, the code is doing nothing. Loading a skin that inherits from this class will load exactly like the regular skin object. That's no fun. In the skin I was working with, I added three ASP.Net controls, a Label and two Literal controls. To make sure that my custom Skin class could reference them, I added three new lines of code.

public class MySkinDefault : DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin
{

protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label lbl;

protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal ltcTop;

protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal ltcBottom;

public MySkinDefault()

{

}

The new items are scoped as protected so that they can interact with the ASCX file. This is important because if they are marked private, the code-behind file that gets generated by the .Net framework wil not be able to access the controls. For more info, check this link out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/015103yb(vs.71).aspx. It's a bit dated, but it helps explain.

Now that I have controls on my skin that I can reference, I need to be able to dynamically fill them. For that, I need to override the base class's OnLoad event.

protected override void OnLoad( EventArgs e )

{

if (!IsPostBack)

{

if (Context.Request.Url.Host == www.myexample.com)

{

lbl.Text = "I am at myexample.com!";

ltcTop.Text = "Some where else!";

}

else

{

lbl.Text = "I am not at myexample.com!";

ltcTop.Text = "myexample.com";

}

ltcBottom.Text = ltcTop.Text;

}

base.OnLoad( e );

}

Two things to note:

The override keyword let's me override the base implementation of the OnLoad event. Since it's overriding the event, I don't need to pass it a sender (that's already done for me in the initial declaration).
I want DotNetNuke's base Skin object to pick up where my method completes, so I call my base class's OnLoad event, passing the e argument from my class. The reason I want DNN to finish it's work is because the Page_Load event does a bunch of more stuff, and I don't want it to code it in my implmentation.

My finished class looks like this:

public class MySkinDefault : DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin
{

protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label lbl;

protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal ltcTop;

protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal ltcBottom;

public MySkinDefault()

{

}

protected override void OnLoad( EventArgs e )

{

if (!IsPostBack)

{

if (Context.Request.Url.Host == www.myexample.com)

{

lbl.Text = "I am at myexample.com!";

ltcTop.Text = "Some where else!";

}

else

{

lbl.Text = "I am not at myexample.com!";

ltcTop.Text = "myexample.com";

}

ltcBottom.Text = ltcTop.Text;

}

base.OnLoad( e );

}

Pretty simple stuff. Now comes the fun part of making sure that my Skin uses this class. To do that, I need to make certain of two things:

In the Page Declaration section, I need to inherit from this class, not the DotNetNuke Skin class.
That my Label and my Literal controls are present on the skin. Since I'm not checking to see if those to control instances are null, they must be there. Otherwise I get a NullException.

Here's what my skin object would look like:

<%@ Control Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" Explicit="True" Inherits=" MySkinDefault" %>

<table>

<tr>

tr>

<tr>

tr>

<tr>

tr>

table>

And there you have it! An overridden skin that you can customize even further than the what the out of the box DotNetNuke install provides.

Troubleshooting DNN Upgrade Issue on Windows Server 2008 or IIS7

scott@n3bu1a.com — Wed, 06 May 2009 04:51:00 GMT

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