Our Division Manager and Project Manager as well announced yesterday that we are about to start a new project – a BIG one! This has been awarded to us few months ago but due to some issues, the development was not started right away.

After a meeting with our client, it was agreed that we have to catch up with schedule despite the delay. The approach is, instead of preparing all the necessary documents (SRS, Project Plan, etc.) before starting with the development, we have to create a prototype to be presented next week. Whew! Can we meet the clients expectation?

Let’s see how will DotNetNuke help us achieve this. It’s been more than a year since my last implementation of DNN I used version 4.7 if I’m not mistaken and the recent stable version released was 4.9.

Installation

I have to go for several tries and errors and failed installation and finally succeed. Installation is just similar with the previous version except for one thing. I have to rename the database file (Database.mdf, by default) with the database name I created. Failure to do it will result to this error:

“Connection Error(s):
Index #: 0
Source: .Net SqlClient Data Provider
Class: 11
Number: 4060
Message: Cannot open database “DATABASE.MDF” requested by the login. The login failed.”

Thanks to this thread at the DNN forum:
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/107/threadid/250478/scope/posts/Default.aspx

For those who are having trouble installing DNN 4.9 here is a good guide:
http://www.bestwebsites.co.nz/dotnetnuke/easy-dotnetnuke-installation-guide/

I really had a hard time setting up DNN ever since. A lot of issues arises in the midst of installation process. I must admit, it’s really hard to implement .Net framework applications.

Despite having trouble doing it, having an open source application in a .Net framework is good enough. Also, in fairness, DNN 4.9 theme is very far better than the earlier versions.

More things to learn on DotNetNuke

There are a lot of things that I have to learn about DNN. I need to customized a commercial module to fit our clients requirement. I need to understand its API and skinning as well.