Installing DotNetNuke (DNN) under Windows 7

Many of my students at BCIT have asked me for help with the installation of DotNetNuke (DNN) under IIS 7 on Windows 7. This is a little bit different from previous Windows operating systems because of the security model and the default application pool account that IIS 7 uses.

The prerequisite is to have SQL Server Express and the IIS feature activated on your Windows 7 environment.

Here are the steps that I recomended to my students:

1. Download DNN from http://dotnetnuke.codeplex.com/releases/view/44102 and install it in a directory like c:\DotNetNuke
2. Copy "release.config" to "web.config" in the root directory of DNN
3. In IIS 7 add a "New Application" under the "Default Web Site" pointing to the location where DNN was installed (like c:\DotNetNuke).
4. Create a new application pool named "dnn" in IIS 7. Changed "Load user profile" property to "False" by clicking on the "Advanced Settings" link of the "dnn" application pool.
5. Set the application pool for your "Default Web Site" to "dnn" by clicking on the "Basic Settings" link
6. Give the physical directory of your site (I.E. c:\DotNetNuke) full access permission to account "IIS AppPool\dnn"
7. Point your browser to http://localhost/DotNetNuke. If all goes well you will enter the DNN configuration wizard.

Vancouver Silverlight User Group (VanSLUG.NET) Launch

On May 5, 2010 I launched the Vancouver Silverlight User Group which I named VanSLUG. The group's web site is at http://vanslug.net/. The first meeting was held at BCIT and was co-hosted by VanSPUG, .netBC, and VanSLUG. Habaneros sponsored the snacks. We had attendance of over 80 people.

The speaker was Laurent Duveau, who is a Silverlight MVP from Quebec City. He gave a talk entitled "Silverlight 4 Business Applications". His presentation was very well received and he got many questions from the audience. He has blogged about the event at:

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2010/05/09/my-talk-at-the-launch-of-the-vancouver-silverlight-user-group.aspx

You can download his presentation and examples from the above site.

Getting FTP to work on Windows 2008 server

I installed the FTP server feature on a Windows 2008 server. However, when I tried to connect from an FTP client, I consistantly got an error suggesting that the directory could not be listed, even though authentication went through. I checked the Windows Firewall setting and found that "FTP Server" was indeed checked in the exceptions list. A quick google saved my day. You can configure the Windows Firewall to allow non-secure FTP traffic with these two command-line commands:

1) Open port 21 on the firewall
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP (no SSL)" action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in localport=21
2) Activate firewall application filter for FTP (aka Stateful FTP) that will dynamically open ports for data connections
netsh advfirewall set global StatefulFtp enable

Kudos to this site: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winserver2008appcompatabilityandcertification/thread/72ea0c7d-1071-4637-a38f-e77195e8a738

Installing "RIA Services" on IIS 7

To install "RIA Services" in an IS 7.x environment:

1) Download the "RiaServices.msi" file from the Microsoft download page for "WCF RIA Services Release Candidate 2 for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010".

2) Since you are not expected to have Visual Studio .NET 2010 on the server, it suffices that you only install the assemblies into the GAC. This is done by installing the msi file with these command line swithches:

msiexec /i RiaServices.msi SERVER=TRUE

Cannot uninstall "WCF RIA Services Beta"

There is a bug in "WCF RIA Services Beta" software that makes it almost impossible to uninstall it from add/remove programs in windows. The side effect is that you cannot install the "Silverlight tooks for Visual Studio 2010" without completely uninstalling "WCF RIA Services Beta".

I found this article that proposes a brute force solution to this problem:

http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/149912/334721.aspx

How do you add a list ID to a form?

Add a calculated field column with formula "=ID".

Building LOB Applications with Silverlight 3

I had a blast at the TechFest 2009 event held at BCIT in Burnaby, BC on Saturday November 21, 2009. We had about 250 attendees out of 500 registrations. The initial feedback I got from attendees was very positive. My only disappointment is that I lost the camera used to take pictures of the event. It is more to do with the value of the pictures rather than the camera itself. Oh well, shit happens.

I gave a talk at TechFest 2009 on the topic of "Building LOB Applications with Silverlight 3". You can download the powerpoint and demo code from this link:

http://penguin.bcit.ca/medhat/techfest2009/SilverlightLobApps.zip