This blogpost is about disk permissions and asp.net applications like DotNetNuke. Although there are probably many posts like this I write this because permissions, or more precisely the lack of them, are the root cause of many support requests. And a little knowledge is all that would have been needed to avoid the situation.

Background: the worker process and its app pool An asp.net application is just that: an application. It is a program running on your server calculating what HTML to spew out to the requesting browser. This is quite different from serving html in the classic way. There the server just streams files from your server’s hard disk over the wire. No processing as such. Just “serving”. But asp.net applications (and their predecessor ASP and alternatives such as PHP) require the server to process instructions of a program that will tell it what to send to the client. This has given us the data driven web site and the whole Web 2.0 revolution.

To do this processing the server starts...

Today, Document Exchange 6 (DMX6 in short) has been uploaded to this site and Snowcovered. After Months of programming, debugging, tweaking, and … a conference (DNN World in Orlando) I am very proud to announce that DMX 6 is final. Although this release is somewhat behind the internal schedule, it was not opportune to release earlier. Next to some changes in the data model and codebase there are numerous visible enhancements. Allow me to guide you round this new version.



First you’ll notice the familiar 3 panel Ajax UI has been replaced with a 2 panel version (the details panel...

Just a few days ago the snowplow poles have gone into the ground along our roads.This means two things: 1. the snow is coming, and 2. it’s conference season. Every year around this time of the year there is the main US DotNetNuke conference. This year it’s called DotNetNuke World. It’s in Orlando on November 9-11 and I will be attending. And just like 2007 and 2009 I will be presenting as well.

I’ve kept rather quiet lately as I’ve been working hard on this new version of Document Exchange. But just now I feel this is now at a stage where it can begin being released in the wild. DMX 6 builds on the strong features of DMX 5 and adds a bunch more. While at the same time effort has been devoted to try and slim down where possible.

To our second installment on this two part series on handlers and modules in ASP.NET web applications, their significance and how to begin debugging situations where things have gone haywire. Like I mentioned in the previous post on handlers: modules and handlers go together like peas and carrots. The main difference is the following: whereas a handler runs only when ASP.NET has decided it should handle the incoming request and ASP.NET stops after it has found the handler, the module always runs on every request and ASP.NET continues. So the way that looks is that upon a web request ASP.NET first passes the request to each and every module in the list of modules and then tries to find a handler for it and passes the request on. Most crucially a module can alter a request as it passes through it or set the stage for other components before they...

This post is the first of a two part series about handlers and modules and is an attempt to offload what I know about handlers to you. Knowing what handlers are and how they work is what separates the savvy from the not-so-savvy when it comes to IIS administration. Although very few modules in the DotNetNuke ecosystem use/rely on handlers, those that do experience a steady stream of support calls along the lines of “hey, XYZ doesn’t work” and it is down to a handler issue. Examples of modules that use handlers are Ultra Video Gallery and Document Exchange. DotNetNuke uses handlers itself as well. So what is a handler? In a nutshell a handler is piece of code that handles a web request. To understand why it’s good to know more about this you need to look closer at http traffic (i.e. the bits and bytes that go back and forth between your browser and the server).

While work on DMX 6 is making good progress here's a bugfix update of DMX 5.3.

This release fixes an important notifications issue in 5.3.6 that cropped up, plus a couple of minor things.

It has been a while since the last release. With the release of DNN 05.06.01 a minor issue cropped up and we've harvested a couple of other fixes in the meantime.

A critical bug crept into the DMX 5.3.4 codebase. This version repairs that.