Why did you choose ASP.NET 2.0?
DotNetNuke® began its life as a Microsoft sample application written for ASP.NET 1.0. Over the years it was migrated to ASP.NET 1.1, and finally to ASP.NET 2.0 (in November 2005). Recently integration with ASP.NET AJAX was added to its distinguished list of application features. ASP.NET is one of the few mature enterprise web platforms available in the software industry today, providing a rock solid foundation upon which we add additional value with the DotNetNuke web application framework.
How did ASP.NET AJAX help you improve your user experience?
Supporting a single site with more than 440,000 registered users is a significant challenge. Managing the huge volume of data in a manner which still allows the user interface to remain responsive requires innovative engineering and constant focus on performance. ASP.NET AJAX provides a rich programming model which abstracts the complex implementation details for creating efficient user interfaces which leverage the strengths of client-side and server-side techniques.
What ASP.NET AJAX features did you take advantage of?
DotNetNuke has a robust extensibility model for adding new content management and administrative features known as Modules. Leveraging its highly optimized portal engine, Modules are injected into a page dynamically at run-time and with the integration of ASP.NET AJAX, a Module can now be wrapped in an UpdatePanel to provide a richer, more responsive user experience. In order to better support DotNetNuke’s vibrant third party commercial module ecosystem we also took advantage of the client-side ASP.NET AJAX library to create a dynamic Solutions Explorer which allows DotNetNuke sites to consume up-to-date information about third party offerings.
What was the ASP.NET AJAX development experience like?
Our initial challenge was related to the fact that ASP.NET AJAX is not yet installed on all production Windows hosting servers; therefore, the DotNetNuke application could not include a hard dependency on this component. We solved this dilemma by adding our own AJAX abstraction layer which takes care of the complex detection logic and allows the application to function with or without ASP.NET AJAX installed. Our other challenge involved removing the Legacy application setting for xhtmlConformance (a remnant of our evolution from ASP.NET 1.x). This change caused some compatibility issues for third party modules but provided the extra benefit of more standards-compliant HTML output. Overall we found the ASP.NET AJAX development experience to be very efficient and highly practical from a business perspective.
What other Microsoft technologies does your site use?
DotNetNuke relies on Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server for its run-time environment support. On the development side, DotNetNuke can be used with Visual Web Developer Express or Visual Studio 2005.
Anything else you want to add?
DotNetNuke® is a registered trademark of DotNetNuke Corporation.
The official community resource site is located at www.dotnetnuke.com.