Pants Optional!

"Our Development Process" - My Response

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:49:24 GMT

Today Bruce Onder (@bonder) posted a link on Twitter to an agile development blog for Target Process (link: http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2009/10/our-development-process.html ). Now I appreciate reading about other development processes but I just wanted to say some of us don’t get the luxury of developing in such a controlled environment.

In my company there are three developers and I act as a coordinator. Now we usually don’t even work the same projects. In fact one of my developers spends almost all his time just writing reports and another is spending almost all his time wrangling ancient dBase stuff into .NET so we can move the company as a whole forward.

Our development process:

Boss walks in with an idea or a client request.
I start to ask questions and start writing on the whiteboard
He agrees that its bigger than it first sounds.
Tells me he promised it by Friday, of course its already 5:00 pm Wednesday!
I decide if I will do it or hand it off to one of the other developers.

I think its great that others have controlled and good systems in place but sometimes controlled CHAOS is easier!

‘Privacy Statement’ and ‘Terms of Use’ in DNN

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:53:46 GMT

When I build my sites in DNN I really do not like to use the default ‘Terms of Service’ and ‘Privacy Statement’ controls. For one thing the controls place the content in the Content Pane of the admin skin the site uses and sometimes this is problematic for a pleasing and cohesive site design. I found a possible ‘bug’ that helps me create my own privacy and terms pages without a lot of work. This is one bug I hope the DNN team doesn’t fix anytime soon! :)

Any skin that uses the current skin objects for ‘Privacy Statement’ and ‘Terms of Use’ can take advantage of this little hack.

Make sure your site is using a url format of HumanFriendly. So in your web.config file you will need to find the line for the friendly url provider and if you are using the DNNFriendlyURL provider make sure it has urlFormat="HumanFriendly" as one of the parameters.
Create a new tab/page with a page title of ‘Privacy’.
Add your own content, move modules around on this page, and change skins as you would any other page.
Go to any other page and click the link created for the ‘Privacy Statement’ it should now navigate to the page you just created and not to the ‘Privacy’ control.
Repeat steps 2 – 4 using a page title of ‘Terms’ for the ‘Terms of Use’ page.

One downside to this is the lack of internationalization in the default HTML module but this can be overcome with other modules like the Apollo multi language module. I think the increased and more transparent control over the ‘Terms’ and ‘Privacy’ pages offsets this downside especially if you are turning the site over to non technical people to edit.

Textarea fun, making textareas auto expand!

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:29:02 GMT

The website I work on as a fulltime developer has some unique challenges. Besides covering over 10 languages for both content and UI we have a lot of text areas where users can describe and enter various bits of free form data. We provide reports for the information but for some reason unknown to me lots of our users print out the form with all the text areas they filled in as a ‘report’. This was never intended so the first request to make the text area larger so all the typed in info would print sort of struck me as strange, why not print the report that shows all the info? Well as any developer can tell you it doesn't matter if the problem is the programming or not its your problem!

I set out to fix this with jQuery since I did not want to go back and revise 62 data entry pages! jQuery.com had a few plugins that I was never able to make the work the way I wanted. One of the problems with the plug-in I first used was that they required the user to click in the text area to activate the function and expand to the size of the text. Typing into the text area worked great but when a user pulled up a saved record they had to click in all the text areas to ‘size’ them for printing. I finally came across this article on Sitepoint.com for an auto expanding text area, http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/07/29/build-auto-expanding-textarea-1/. The plug-in not only expands correctly it a few optional parameters for the function to keep pages from becoming to large or shrinking too small.

I had to search a long time to find this and wanted to post it on my blog here so others may have an easier time finding this script.

Ouch!

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:50:54 GMT

OpenForce ‘09 – In case you didn’t know

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:48:24 GMT

OpenForce '09 Connections in Las Vegas promises to be a great opportunity for DotNetNuke and Microsoft .NET developers to meet and learn about the latest developments in the DotNetNuke world. DotNetNuke enables organizations to develop rich, interactive websites and web applications for Microsoft .NET in a fraction of the time that they can develop directly in .NET.

This year features a great selection of speakers who will provide insights into DotNetNuke module and skin development and administration.

Visit the DevConnections/OpenForce '09 website now to register. The conference is held in conjunction with the Microsoft DevConnections conference at the Mandalay Bay Hotel from November 9th through the 12th.

I’ll be there and really looking for people to hang with!

DNN and content management – new ideas!

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:38:01 GMT

Been buried in work for awhile so this blog post has been festering in the back of my mind for a few weeks now. My full time job has lately been taking up a bit of my usual free time with extra employees coming on and new clients coming on but the one area we seem to be having real luck with is how we can quickly train new users and new clients to use the software. I think the way we have built our modules for use could serve as a lesson for others looking to build modules for ‘non techie’ users.

Early in development of our online safety management system I used the normal drop down menu on the container and used the settings or implement the menu interface to add a menu to the container menu for managing the module and what we considered its ‘Corporate’ administration functions. Usually these functions consist of setting up lists and setting parameters for employees further down the chain to manage a safety program. Out initial tests with the management of the modules in this manner was a dismal failure. Many of our users simply didn’t understand the concept. Some were very computer savvy but many of our users we found were familiar with Word and/or Excel where a menu item does a function and does not have multiple purposes.

With this initial UI failure we quickly switched over to our menu having a ‘Administration’ section where our users could set up the lists and parameters of the different modules in a central area. This was a huge success! Not only was it easy to tell our users where to go they had very few options when they got there so the administration of the site became very self explanatory in some ways, the module logic itself can sometimes be complicated so training was still necessary. We have also found that we can control what roles can use different ‘Corporate’ administration functions with a finer level of control than was available with the container menu control and it has a cleaner interface in general.

I would propose that other developers may want to consider modules that need to have a administration function accessed by non techie users may want to consider building the administration screens as a separate module so it can be placed on a specific page for access by different roles of users, or even specific users if needed. Yes this is more work, but in my opinion this is a more flexible solution than the default menu interface DNN provides. In some ways I think may also be one of the reasons that some people feel like DNN is less than optimal solution for content management. Perhaps changing the model in DNN 6 may make DNN easier to use for those people who don’t seem to ‘get’ how DNN works.

What do you think? Many other DNN developers out there have come up with solutions for this exact problem which one works best for you?

Writers Block!

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:06:37 GMT

I have writers block! I am not a professional writer, so times like this are real stressful for me. Usually I have no problem going on and on about useless stuff, as you can tell from my other posts. Sometimes I have ideas and post them and sometimes, well, its just the regular c*** that you find on other blogs.

I have ideas about what to blog about but I cant seem to get the mental block out of the way to write it all down. As my main boss would say ‘I don’t see as much mental vomit coming from you’, great visual huh?

How do you deal with writers block would love to see your ideas!

Twitter Auth with DNN

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:57:16 GMT

Oliver Hine has just released a new authentication provider for DNN that works with the Open Auth system Twitter has put in place. While this is his first release of the provider I can’t seem to break it in the 4x version (haven't tested the 5x release yet). You can get the provider here http://oliverhine.com/DotNetNuke/Providers/TwitterAuthenticationProvider.aspx. If you want to experiment with it I have it installed on the site here. Go to the login page and try it out.

Lost Admin/Host Password in DNN

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:34:28 GMT

I had someone forget their admin password to a portal I installed 5 years ago, apparently the sticky note fell off the site administrators monitor and got thrown away (#grin*). They called me to get it back but of course I had them change it when I left. Thinking this is a problem for others I have the standard database hack/solution for this that works for the DNN user system.

*You need access to the database to do this:

Create a new user account by registration (this time, please remember the password you enter!)

If "register" is not displayed for the portal, go to table "Portals" in your database and enter value "2" into column "UserRegistration".

Go to database, enter table "ASPNet_Membership"
Go to new user account (usually the last one) and copy the encrypted values of columns "Password" and "PasswordSalt" into the same columns of user account "host" (usually the first entry in this table)
Login as user "host" using the new password and delete the newly created user.
If you changed the “Portals” table, revert UserRegistration mode in Site Settings.
Remember your password!!!!!!!

Report Viewer – Multi select drop-down boxes are too small

Dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:44:01 GMT

We recently deployed a report library for our online application and one of the parameters that exists for almost all reports is what locations to run the report for. Fairly standard huh? So far so great. When we went and looked at how the parameters were presented we were surprised there was no way to adjust the width of those drop down lists, they are hard coded to 184px, this cut off almost half the name of the locations for a lot of our clients, made it very unfriendly to our users.

After some Google searches and a Twitter post basically discovered the only way to really change those is a CSS hack. Thanks to Brandon Hays for his blog post on it located here (Changing the Size of ReportViewer Parameter Dropdown List). Take a look at that blog post for the theory behind this solution. Our problem was that Mr. Hayes stopped a little short of what we needed and so I wanted to share my code so others can benefit from it.

I did this in a DNN module but the basic premise will work for any ASP.NET page that loads reports dynamically into the viewer.

In the page where the report is loaded in the PreRender event you will want to loop through the controls and add the relevant CSS class for the drop down in the report viewer like this:

        1: Protected Sub Page_PreRender(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.PreRender

       2:             For Each oCtrl As Control In Me.ReportViewer1.Controls

       3:                 If oCtrl.GetType.ToString.ToLower = "microsoft.reporting.webforms.parametersarea" Then

       4:                     For Each xCtrl As Control In oCtrl.Controls

       5:                         If xCtrl.GetType.ToString.ToLower = "microsoft.reporting.webforms.multivaluevalidvaluescontrol" Then

       6:                             Me.Literal1.Text += "div#" & xCtrl.ClientID & "_divDropDown {width: 500px !important;}" & vbCrLf

       7:                         End If

       8:                     Next

       9:                 End If

      10:             Next

      11:         End Sub