DotNetNuke is a powerful open source framework that creates and deploys robust modules on the ASP.NET platform. Written by its core team of developers, this book will provide you with the tools and insight you’ll need to install, configure, and develop your own stunning Web applications using DotNetNuke 4.

You’ll first gain an inside look into the history of this project as well as the basic operations of a DotNetNuke portal. You’ll then find detailed information on how the application is architected and how you can extend it by building modules and skins. With this information, you’ll be able to complete projects such as commercial Web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, and custom vertical applications.

What you will learn from this book

The latest features and functionality of DotNetNuke 4 for ASP.NET 2.0
The best way to install DotNetNuke on the server
Proven tips for managing and administering a DotNetNuke portal
How to dramatically enhance your Web site’s user interface using skins
Techniques for extending the portal framework
Ways to create a unique look for your portal

Who this book is for
This book is for the nondeveloper or administrator who wants to dive into the exciting DotNetNuke framework. It is also for experienced ASP.NET developers who want to use DotNetNuke to build dynamic ASP.NET sites or create add-ins to DotNetNuke.

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LAURENCE MORONEY is a senior technology evangelist at Microsoft.
He specializes in Silverlight and promoting how Silverlight can be
used in real-world systems to enhance the user experience. Author of
many computer books and hundreds of articles, he’s usually found
tapping at his keyboard. Outside of his computer passions, he’s big
into all kinds of sports, and has been involved with professional
men’s and women’s soccer.

nFABIO CLAUDIO FERRACCHIATI is a senior consultant and a senior analyst/developer using
Microsoft technologies. He works for Brain Force (www.brainforce.com) at its Italian
branch (www.brainforce.it). He is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for .NET, a
Microsoft Certified Application Developer for .NET, a Microsoft Certified Professional,
and a prolific author and technical reviewer. Over the past ten years, he’s written articles
for Italian and international magazines and coauthored more than ten books on a variety
of computer topics. You can read his LINQ blog at www.ferracchiati.com.

This book is aimed at equipping you, the developer, to understand the technologies that
are available to allow you to rapidly build secure, quality web experiences. Note that I use
the term experiences and not applications or sites. That is because the user experience is
the heart of the future Web.
Before you can start looking at the future, it is good to understand the current suite of
web development and deployment technologies that are available to you. In Part 1 of this
book, you’ll look at the Microsoft stack of technologies that allow you to build web services
and applications, and how you’ll deploy them. It will be scenario-driven, so instead
of going into depth on the various APIs, you’ll get your hands dirty in a step-by-step
approach to building, testing, and deploying multitier web applications. You’ll look at
databases and how to connect your application to them, and you’ll manage these connections
through the deployment process. Ultimately, in the first six chapters, you’ll get
a whirlwind tour of the full life cycle of application development using the .NET Framework
(which always looks good on a resume!).
If you are new to ASP.NET, these six chapters will condense everything you need to
know to get up and running with the framework. By the end of them, you’ll have learned
the technology, the tools, and the servers, and gained the know-how to deploy a multipletier
web service–based application to the enterprise server technology from Microsoft.
Even if you are experienced with ASP.NET, this is a nice refresher!
Chapter 1 will give you a tour of the history of web development, from static HTML
served up from the network, through activation of servers using CGI, to activation of
pages using ASP, PHP, and other technologies. It ends with a survey of the managed APIs
that are available for building web applications, including J2EE, PHP, and ultimately
ASP.NET.
In Chapter 2, you will look into ASP.NET in a little more detail, going through the
basics of web development with this API. You’ll see its architecture and how it uses the
concept of controls to generate markup from the server. You’ll see how it hangs together
with the standard web technologies of HTML, JavaScript, DHTML, and more. There is a
great suite of tools available to the ASP.NET developer, including the free Web Developer
Express, and you’ll look at how to download, install, and use this to build, deploy, and
debug ASP.NET server applications. Finally, you’ll survey the lifetime of an ASP.NET application,
learning how the framework can provide stateful communication in an inherently
stateless environment.
Chapter 3 takes you further into building ASP.NET web applications through the use
of web forms. You’ll look into the page processing model, postbacks, and how events are
handled in web applications. You’ll also start to look into data in your web applications.
You’ll see how to download, configure, and manage a SQL Server Express instance, and
how to access the data and functionality in it from code, from UI tools, and from data
binding.
Chapter 4 brings you further down the data path, looking at data binding in ASP.NET
and explaining the fundamentals of the ADO.NET API. You’ll look into the architecture of
this flexible data framework, including data providers, and the DataSet and DataAdapter
components. You’ll also see how some of the data-aware controls such as the GridView
are used to provide great data experiences for your users.
Chapter 5 takes you in a different direction, looking at Web Services and how this
vital technology is implemented using ASP.NET. You’ll see how to build a web service that
wraps a database and exposes its contents to users in a platform-agnostic, technologyagnostic
way. With Web Services, the technology that implements the service should be
abstract, and you’ll see how this is achieved using XML and the WS-I basic profile. You’ll
see how you can build your services to be consumed by applications running on other
technologies, such as Java. You’ll expand on some of the examples from Chapter 4, seeing
how a multitier application can be built using Web Services as the data tier, and binding
controls such as the GridView to them.
Part 1 of the book wraps up in Chapter 6. Here you will look at how to get your applications
deployed and running using Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, and IIS 6. You’ll
look at how IIS serves pages up, and go through the scenario of deploying the multipletier
application that you built in Chapter 5, moving it in a phased manner, performing
unit testing on each tier. You’ll also look at how to use the tools to automatically set up
the virtual web sites that your application will run in.
Once you’ve wrapped all that up, you’ll be ready to move into Part 2, which delves
into the next-generation web technologies, and take an in-depth look at AJAX extensions
for .NET, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation,
Silverlight, and more.

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