JavaScript is actually quite a simple language.  It is described as a loosely typed language, which means that unlike C# it doesn’t enforce a strict “typing” model. 

In fact, in JavaScript, aside from a few primitive value types, everything is an object.  Ok, some of you C# developers are saying – that’s true of C#, everything in C# is considered an object.  The difference is that whereas in C# everything is an instance of a class which "derives” from the Object class, everything in JavaScript actually is an object.

I am a Web Developer – and so you would think that I use JavaScript as a routine part of my job. 

However, until recently I have been mainly involved writing “server-side” Visual Basic or C# code in the ASP.NET Web Forms model.  In that model, when a user clicks a button (or hyperlink) on a web page or makes a selection in a drop-down control this invariably results in a post back to the server which responds to the client-side action, and then completely refreshes the page.

“It’s a Knockout” – a phrase often heard at boxing matches.  Or for those who remember 70’s and 80’s European TV shows, it was the name of a BBC television game show (It’s a Knockout or Jeux Sans Frontiers), also memorialized in the Peter Gabriel song “Games without Frontiers”. 

Welcome to my new blog.

Over the last few weeks I have been setting up my new “blog” site using DotNetNuke.  My previous site used BlogEngine.NET – an excellent ASP.NET blogging platform.  However, I have decided it is time to move to a new DotNetNuke based site.

Last week I gave two presentations at DevTeach in Vancouver.  I am now making the slide decks and demo files available.

I have been working for a while on a library of simple components, which I have called Project “Naif”.  Naif is the masculine form of the more common adjective “naïve”.   Both words are originally French and while naïve is in fairly common usage in English, naif is much less used.  But they mean the same thing – marked by unaffected simplicity - as defined by Merriam Webster

In the first post in this series I pointed out that DotNetNuke places few requirements on module developers, and this is often daunting to new developers – “where do I start?” being a common refrain.

So where do you start?

Before we actually start to build our first module lets look at what constitutes a module.  In the default DotNetNuke skin/template that is used when installing DotNetNuke there are a number of examples of Text/HTML modules.

DotNetNuke has a rich eco-system of Modules, both Open Source and Commercial.  In many ways this is our biggest strength as a CMS platform.  No matter what you want to do with your site – there is often a module that already does it.

In my opinion this is due to the flexibility provided by the core DotNetNuke Framework.  Many other platforms are very prescriptive – as an extension developer you have to follow a fixed shopping list of rules – there is invariably only one way to create an extension, which may not work for what you want to do. 

Today Scot Guthrie, Corporate Vice President in the Microsoft Server and Tools Business announced in a blog that some of the ASP.NET technologies that are used by web developers, including me, were to be made available under an open source license.

In my previous post in this series on NoSQL Databases, I showed how RavenDB embedded could be added to an existing ASP.NET MVC 3 application using NuGet and how it can be configured to use a folder in the App_Data folder. 

In this blog I will add the code needed for my TaskController class to use RavenDB to store its data.