Thoughts from the Wet Coast
The musings of an ASP.NET Developer from Canada's We(s)t Coast

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 this series I intend to present Tips and Tricks as well as some good patterns and practices for DNN development.  In this first post lets take a look at the so-called “SOLID” Design Principles.  These are a series of principles designed to help you build good products.

As Senior Architect for DNN Corp I get to be involved in interviewing candidates for developer positions within the company.  Thankfully, I don’t have any direct management responsibilities - its not what I enjoy - but I am asked to interview candidates to determine both their technical competence as well as to help determine whether they will fit with the team chemistry.

Many candidates come with glowing resumes - their list of skills and experience is excellent, but I have detected a disturbing trend - too many developers don’t appear to think of software development as a craft.  They list 5 yrs. of experience with .NET or 3 yrs. experience with JavaScript.  That looks like they might be excellent candidates, but when asked about such things as variable scope in JavaScript or Dependency Injection, they can’t answer these fairly simple techniques of our craft.

A Happy New Year to all readers of my Blog.  I hope 2013 was a good year for you and that 2014 will be prosperous for you and yours.

Here on the Wet Coast,  one of my New Year’s resolutions has been to be more regular in my blogging activity, and I have already made some plans in that regard.

In my previous post I reviewed Icenium - a new ICE (Integrated Cloud Environment) that is based on Apache Cordova.  But what is Apache Cordova? 

About a year ago Adobe announced the purchase of Nitobe - a small Vancouver company - whose main claim to fame was PhoneGap - a framework for building cross-platform mobile Apps.  With the purchase of Nitobe, the PhoneGap framework was released as an Open Source project and submitted to the Apache Software Foundation as an Incubator project.

Earlier this week Telerik released a cool new development tool for creating hybrid mobile apps.  Icenium is an Integrated Cloud Environment that uses the SaaS - Software as a Service - model.  By hosting the development environment in the cloud developers don’t have to worry about managing the SDKs required to develop mobile applications.

I presented a session on the DAL 2 at DNN World in Orlando, and a few people asked about “calculated” properties - or properties that do not have any matching column in the database.  This is an important feature for any “auto-mapped” repository implementation, so we have added three new Attributes that control the mapping of properties and columns.

So far in my review of the new DAL2 I have focused on the features designed to improve developer productivity - i.e. the Repository.  In this post I am going to step back and look at other features which mimic the existing DAL+, and provide the developer with a sense of working “close to the metal”.

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Back in April I started a series of blog posts on DotNetNuke Module Development. So far we haven’t actually done any development, so in this blog post we will create our first module, and in the long-held tradition of software development - lets call it Hello World.

In part 2 of this series I mentioned that the only thing required by a module was that it needed to implement the IModuleControl interface...