Professional DNN7: Open Source .NET CMS Platform

System Architecture

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Delving into patterns
• Examining the DNN architecture
• Exploring the basic layers in DNN

The initial version of DNN (or DotNetNuke) was derived from the IBuySpy Portal starter kit that was released in both a C# version and a VB.NET version. IBuySpy was designed to provide a real-world example of some of the new development concepts of the ASP.NET platform.

While DotNetNuke 7 still retains some of the core principles that were introduced in IBuySpy Portal, if you look at the source of DNN today, it doesn't really resemble IBuySpy. Actually, DNN 7 bears little resemblance to the earliest versions of DNN. Since DNN 6, the application is written in C#, while earlier versions were written in VB.NET.

The key technologies used in DNN have changed over the years. DNN 7 uses the following technologies in its supported architecture:

• Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) version 7 or later running in Integrated Pipeline mode.
• An operating system that supports IIS 7 (that is, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, Windows 2008 Server, or Windows Server 2012).
• The ASP.NET framework. (Early versions of DNN ran on the then-current version of ASP.NET. DotNetNuke version 7 requires ASP.NET version 4.0 or later for both runtime and development.)
• C# (Visual Basic.NET or any other CLR-compliant language can be used to write extensions to the platform.) ...