From the Desk of Brandon Haynes

I am pleased to announce the publically-available preview of a new templated mega-menu provider.  This preview is for internal evaluation only, and should not be used in production.  A full release, including source, is expected at the end of the month.

The provider allows for marking one or more pages as being templated; during instantiation these templates are dynamically inserted into the page.  The templates are highly flexible and may be deployed at the site, skin, or portal level.  This allows for great flexibility in user experience.

The project is hosted on CodePlex and is located here.

By way of example, the default templates available allows styling of the DotNetNuke administrator menu as:

DotNetNuke DNNMenu Templated-Menu Provider Screenshot with Wide Rendering

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DotNetNuke Multifactor Authentication Requiring Password, One-Time SMS PIN, and X.509 Certificate

I am pleased to announce an initial release of a multi-factor provider for the DotNetNuke content management system.

This authentication provider allows a host to configure enhanced authentication (including SMS, SMTP, YubiKey, and X.509 certificates) for any number and combination of portal roles. Each factor must be fulfilled prior to authentication being granted, increasing overall security.

This package may be downloaded from it’s project site, located at http://dnnmultifactor.codeplex.com.

Goals

• A robust, extensible multi-factor authentication framework for the DotNetNuke content management system.
• Complete integration into the framework using existing extension points, with no core modifications or recompilation required.
• Support for host-, administrator-, and user-level configuration, with the ability to vary required factors across an arbitrary set of roles.
• A robust set of included factor providers, including SMS, secure SMTP, YubiKey (www.yubico.com), and X.509 certificate.
• Extension points in the authentication system allowing for development of custom factors by third parties.
• Reliance on the existing ASP.NET membership subsystem for existing (first-factor) authentication.
• Minimization of “custom security” risk by relying, insofar as is possible, upon existing security infrastructure  ASP.NET membership, DotNetNuke portal security, password generation, et cetera.
• As small an overall surface area as is possible, and an absolute reliance upon the existing ASP.NET membership system as a first-factor fallback, should any unforeseen vulnerability exist.

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I have, for some time, been maintaining debug-build versions of the standard DotNetNuke releases.  The debugging symbols contained in these assemblies make some types of problems easier to diagnose (see this for a detailed discussion).

To date, a number of people have successfully used these builds in correcting a number of reasonably arcane problems.  As such (and after some delay), I have elected to deploy debug-build version of the core DNN assemblies for the recently-released 4.9.2 and 5.0.1 version.

Please see this entry for downloads and usage patterns for these versions.

In a recent article, I developed a theoretical basis for an adapter that allows for the adaptation of Entity Framework (EF) entities into IDataReader-implementing form, and announced the preview availability of this software. 

Herein I describe with more specificity the use of the adapter generator and the resultant adapters, and announce the release of the first production-ready version of the adapter generator software.

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Microsoft’s Entity Framework (EF) introduces a new data design paradigm within .NET. This framework, however, can be difficult to implement in projects that internally rely heavily on the exchange of IDataReader-implementing objects between layers (or within interface contracts). This is a shortcoming that is not easily overcome, especially without a standardized method with which to convert EF entities into an object implementing this interface. In many ways, migration of these projects to the Entity Framework is an all-or-nothing proposition.  This is a shortcoming that begs for remediation. 

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Some time ago, I wrote about an approach for enabling ASP.NET 2.0 localization within a DotNetNuke application.  This approach not only required a core modification, but the change introduced a potential breaking change with third party modules.  This was clearly unsatisfactory, and the fact that I was unable to fully solve the problem has been vexing me for some time.

As my research on the recently-released Linq to Sql Adapter (currently hosted on CodePlex) wound down, I decided to investigate a new approach to solving the problem.  In my opinion, an optimal solution would fulfill the following requirements:

1. Require no core changes
2. Be side-by-side compatible with the existing DotNetNuke localization services
3. Require little configuration by a hosting user
4. Allow strongly-typed per-portal and per-culture access to existing global DotNetNuke resources
5. Minimal additional in-memory footprint and reasonable performance
6. Enable use of the meta:resourcekey attribute in DotNetNuke modules
7. Be fully compatibility with third-party modules

I am pleased to announce a preview release of a custom BuildProvider that, to my knowledge, accomplishes all of these goals.

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In a previous entry, I discussed a potential solution to a longstanding problem.  The DotNetNuke CMS framework allows declaration of an object qualifier and database owner on a per-installation basis.  This effectively varies the fully-qualified database entity names at runtime.  Because the Linq to Sql system by default utilizes a class attribution approach, it does not lend itself well to such runtime adaptation.

Here I describe the steps necessary to use Linq to Sql within a DotNetNuke module in a reliable, distributable manner.

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The .NET-supplied DataContext allows Linq to Sql development using the attributed model automatically generated by a Visual Studio designer. However, when deployed within DotNetNuke, these attributes do not pick up the database owner and object qualfier required by DotNetNuke.  Because of this, large-scale deployment of modules using Linq to Sql is infesable, and modules using the technology are unfortunately limited to internal applications.

To rememdy this issue, I have developed an adapter that converts the attributed meta model generated by the designer into a DotNetNuke-compatable model that uses both the object qualifier and database owner specified by an end-installation. 

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One of my (few) cavils about the DotNetNuke Content Management System is the organization of the administrator menu.  Presenting an administrator with thirteen options (including somewhat inscrutable choices like “Extensions” and “Solutions”), is easily overwhelming for an often-technically unsophisticated administrator.  Indeed, both feedback from users and log analysis have indicated that several of these options are rarely utilized and thereby serve only to clutter the interface and increase the learning curve.

In pre-5.0 versions, despite being persisted to the database like any other page, the admin menu is restricted to one level.  This was a hardcoded limitation; though one could change the verbiage, order, or visibility of the items in the menu, one could not introduce additional levels of organization (without several changes to the core framework).

With DotNetNuke 5.0, however, because administrator pages are treated on-par with any other page on a site, an improvement in organization becomes possible.  Herein I discuss the changes necessary to, in my opinion, improve the overall organization of the DotNetNuke administrator menu.

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I recently encountered an issue with the SSRS ReportViewer control where the parameter drop-down list was of insufficient width for the parameters contained therein.  Surprisingly, a search yielded no solutions.  Indeed, several individuals indicated that changing this width was not possible.

Fortunately, it does turn out to be possible.

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