ADefHelpDesk does not really need an "Upgrade Advisor" but I made one anyway as a proof of concept for the DotNetNuke Core Project. There are thousands of users who do have difficulty upgrading DotNetNuke. My theory is that it should be possible to make a module that users could install before they do an upgrade that would identify potential upgrade problems.

Face it, Benjamin Hermann and his team's EALO is the "Tiger Woods" of DotNetNuke Open Source. It is the project that is so big and unstoppable that the rest of the DotNetNuke Open Source projects actually benefit from the traffic and attention that it brings.

As I pointed out in a previous blog (Effority is "King of the Forge), this module puts up numbers that are so big no other module comes close... at all.

In the spirit of "if you can't beat them join them" I have decided that since the "rest of the field" benefits from the success of "the leader" then it makes sense to help the leader.

Benjamin Hermann and his team (Oliver Dembniak and Johannes Ellenberg) plan to release another version of EALO for DotNetNuke 5 (the current version only works with DotNetNuke 4) on October 16th 2009. It would be great if EALO can get...

 

My wife bought me an Amazon Kindle (warning if you click the link and buy one I will get a "commission"). Because it was a gift I had to go to Settings on the Kindle and "de-register" it from her. I then went on the Amazon.com site, logged in as myself and entered the serial number on the back of the Kindle to register it to myself.

Ok now it's up and working. Kindle has this "Whispernet" thing which basically means it is able to communicate with Amazon.com without requiring...

This took about 4 months of part-time work but I finally got the Silverlight Bridge File Manager working enough so I can release it. This is actually just a small part of a larger project that is Silverlight Bridge. Silverlight Bridge will eventually allow you to see the files on your local computer and drag and drop the files from your local computer to the folders on the server.

Silverlight Bridge is a project that Ian started when he decided that you should be able to see your local hard drive in a Silverlight application. Ian did make a proof of concept that proves his idea will work, he just needs to flesh it out into a complete framework....

We love SketchFlow over here at the Open Light Group. As Ian would say, it's "bomb-diggity". Well the Open Light Group has a Open Source project called SilverlightDesktop.net that uses draggable movable windows. We needed to make these windows in our SketchFlow projects because the point of SketchFlow is that you can quickly make a sketch that actually moves.

I finally got around to updating the Silverlight 3 Drag and Drop sample to use the latest Tim Heuer's Floatable Window.

His latest version fixed the problem with the left side moving while dragging the window to the right. We will work on this in the coming weeks as we prepare to eventually incorporate this into SilverlightDesktop.net. Our desire is to make Floatable Window work in SilverlightDesktop.net without modifying Floatable Window. This will allow SilverlightDesktop.net to benefit from future enhancements with Floatable Window.

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I recently spent about 2 hours making a DotNetNuke Silverlight SketchFlow Viewer. After I had it working with about 20 files and directories the Blend 3 packager creates, I then realized that all you really needed to make it work is the .xap file.

Well Jan Olsmar already created a module Silverlight Media for DotNetNuke® that allows you to load a .xap file for a Silverlight application into your DotNetNuke site.

However, I didn't want my effort to go to waste so I added a way to upload the file through the application rather than requiring you to use the DotNetNuke...

The latest ADefHelpDesk release (A Free Open Source DotNetNuke Help Desk / Support Desk / Ticket Tracker Module) took over 30 hours of work. This is almost half the amount of time it took to create the first version. The reason it took so long is we finally added Localization. This allows users to create additional resource files that will allow site administrators to display ADefHelpDesk in different languages.

To implement Localization we had to go through every screen and replace all text with label controls and add a resource tag and an entry in a corresponding resource file. We also had to create an entry in the corresponding resource file and a reference to it in al the code behind code that generated any text on the page or in emails.

This allows site administrators to create or obtain resource files in additional languages that will allow them to display ADefHelpDesk...

 

I finally got around to creating a DotNetNuke 5 and Silverlight 3 "Hello World" tutorial. Keep in mind that all the Silverlight 2 tutorials still apply so I wont "redo" any of them.

One thing that is different about this tutorial is that I am using the authentication cookie that DotNetNuke passes to the web browser (and Silverlight then passes to the web service) to authenticate the user . This allows me to eliminate code that I normally use in tutorials such as this one: Silverlight 2.0 Webservice Example.

However, this comes at a price. If the user "times out" on the DotNetNuke site due to a period of inactivity, they will also "time out" in the Silverlight application.

One of the advantages of Silverlight is that the user never has to "time out". A...