Professional DotNetNuke®5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET

Chapter 12. Beginning Module Development

This chapter begins the tour of custom module development in DotNetNuke. As you have seen in previous chapters, DotNetNuke provides a significant amount of functionality right out of the box. Nevertheless, each user will have unique business requirements that standard DotNetNuke functionality may not meet. Fortunately, DotNetNuke (DNN) provides developers and third-party independent software vendors (ISVs) the capability to extend the core framework by developing custom modules.

This chapter discusses the decision-making process surrounding the development of custom modules, and then focuses on the architecture and design setup of a sample module, the WROX.Suggestion module. Chapters 13 through 15 cover the architectural layers used for module development in more detail. You begin by setting up your module project to interact with DotNetNuke in Visual Studio 2008, exploring some configuration issues along the way.

Although the use of Visual Studio 2008 is illustrated in this book, you can still use Visual Studio 2005 to develop modules for DotNetNuke 5. The Core Team evaluated this situation extensively and made every effort to ensure the development process would be similar for developers employing either platform on .NET Framework v2.0. Because Visual Studio 2008 has multi-targeting capability on .NET Framework versions from v2.0 through v3.5, you can now use VS 2008 for development everywhere you once used VS 2005. Only the solution files ...