By Ian Lackey on 7/25/2009 11:38 PM

It appears that there is not an easy way to override the content or the style for the area that appears in the DotNetNuke menu when you need to scroll through a long list of menu items. This is not an elegant solution, but it works for me. I was hoping there was a property of the menu control that I had simply overlooked. However, the  CSSScrollItem attribute referenced in the spmenu.js file appeared to be ignored by the menu control. So I was left to dig into the JavaScript a little further. I soon figured out that the default Css class used for this element was always output the same:  .dnn_dnnmenu_ctldnnmenu_spmitmscr

So I gave it a shot and entered this class into my Skin.css file... and it worked!!! I had successfully overridden the default style for the little grey box that appears that the top and/or bottom of the menu when it will not fit in the browser window! So I took it a step further and decided, that since I could not modify the content of the div ( ... ), I would create an image and set it...

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By Michael Washington on 7/25/2009 11:22 AM

 

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...

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By Ian Lackey on 7/24/2009 10:28 PM

I have seen more than one person on the DotNetNuke forums faced with a problem when trying to access their portal. Only to find out that they had moved the portal or changed the hostheader, DNS etc. for the url associated with the portal. As it turns out, the root of the problem is that the Portal Alias is now “out of sync” with the url they are using to access the portal. There are two ways to fix this, that I know of. Updating the records in the PortalAlias table in the DotNetNuke database or pointing the original url back to the portal to align with the portal alias records.

Updating the PortalAlias table should be pretty self explanatory for the most part. Simple open the table in SQL Management Studio and edit the value in the HTTPAlias column to the url you are needing to use for the portal.

The other option of pointing the original url back at the portal may not always be possible. However, there is some trickery that can be used to emulate the original url. This is a well documented and widely...

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By Michael Washington on 7/18/2009 6:43 PM

After seeing this demo: [Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: Rich Interactivity with No Code and the cool way she was able to simply drop a "Behavior" on a button and a menu displays (and allows you to set some properties using simple drop downs no less) and then the button is now able to make another element move, I had to learn how to make behaviors.

There are examples on the web but all the ones I found were based on the Silverlight 3 preview and with the released version of Silverlight 3, there have been changes.

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By Michael Washington on 7/17/2009 11:35 AM

SketchFlow included in Microsoft Expression Blend 3 is really a great program. It is a product that you didn't know you needed until you have it. Essentially after 2 hours of practice, I can now mock up a interactive website about as fast as I could sketch it on paper.

To get started watch these videos:

[Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: SketchFlow Part I [Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: SketchFlow Part II [Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: Visual Data Binding...

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By Michael Washington on 7/3/2009 9:55 AM

Ian and I decided to use the Silverlight Chat a week ago and the conversation went kinda funny. There were long pauses and each person made comments that seemed out of place. After awhile one of us asked the other, "Did you get every message I sent you?".

The chat has a log and we each looked at it and realized that more than half of the conversation was missing! Turns out that any message more than 100 characters was not being sent. It was an easy fix and the latest one is deployed at this link, but had we not used it we would have not found the bug. In testing we always tested using short messages.

At my work we recently started to use ADefHelpDesk. On the first day a number of small bugs popped up. They were small, like a misspelling on a notification email, but they are the sort of thing that still makes a difference. We just did a release...

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