Learn MS .NET

Jason Kergosien has released a video that gives us a first look at the skinning mechanisms within the next version of DotNetNuke.  The video provides a good overview of how to implement legacy skins as well as the new skin packages.  He also gives us a quick look a the host settings and how a default doctype for the portal can be established for the portal.

He walks through the basics of creating a new skin package based on an existing skin and how these new skins can be versioned so as to allow these skins to be easily upgraded as they are improved and changed.  We also see the new license and release notes fields that can be used within our packages as well as the ability to provide our own names for the packages.

He also had a few ideas that sounded good about improvements that could be made in the Cambrian release.  Hope he does a video on the new modules wizard as well. 

Check the video out - “Cambrian” First Look – Skinning Enhancements

On July 28, 2008, the Gallery project released a long awaited beta of their new gallery module for DotNetNuke. This version 4.3.0 is a .NET 2.0 compatible version for use with DotNetNuke 4.8.4 and above.  The recommendation is that it not be used in a production environment just because they do not know if there will be breaking changes between this version and the final released version that would prevent a forward upgrade path.

They have also developed a new site specifically for demonstrating the new features and the latest version for users of the gallery.  This new site can be found at http://www.dnnmediagallery.com/, it has information about the module as well as some documentation and there is a forum setup there as well.

Great job to the Gallery team.

For developers new to programming modules within DNN there is a new tool available at codeplex. Ernst Peter Tamminga has spent several hours documenting the DotNetNuke core routines within the framework. The help files are generated using SandCastle and the SandCastle Help File Builder using the unmodified sources from DotNetNuke.

If you want to browse the help:
- Unzip DNNHelpSystem_CHM.zip into 1 .chm Help File to a local disk folder
- Double click the extracted .chm file.
- Now you can browse all help items MSDN style

Files

MSDN Style help file

documentation, 9947K

Readme

documentation, 3K

SFHB project

source code, 3K

Intellisense

documentation, 216K

Microsoft Windows Vista has many new features, some of which have greatly been improved upon.  One of these features, is the speech recognition tool.  Using my new laptop I started working with the speech recognition tool, this has proved to be rather interesting in that this version seems to be a much better than previous versions.

I decided to do a test by writing this blog post entirely with with the use of speech recognition

  Now this is a novel idea.  Ashley MacIsaac is 33 years old and is offering 50% of all of his future revenue that he generates till he dies in an auction on ebay.  The link below will take you to this offer online.  Now that could be a scary proposition or it could be downright profitable for someone in the long run.  The opening bid that was setup for the auction was 1.5 million and only open to people from Canada.

Ashley MacIsaac Royalties - (eBay.ca item 220252234598 end time 07-Jul-08 20:22:53 EDT)

So how about someone else sell off half their earnings for a lifetime.  I can’t see anyone giving me very much for the future half of my earnings. Unless it’s the ex-wife looking for it.