DotNetNuke 4 C-sharp Modules

DotNetNuke 4 is written for ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Basic. I’m not a big fan of VB, so I do all my .NET development in C#. Luckily, Microsoft has made these languages play very well together, so you can write C# classes that extend classes in assemblies compiled from VB. However the DotNetNuke guys don’t have a lot of documentation about using C#. Their tutorials for writing modules are also very “in-the-box” that assume you want to write modules that work in a very specific way, especially when it comes to the database.

Their module development is very structured, including an MVC-type of framework that feels very forced. They have good ideas about the number of abstraction layers in the data access, but it seems far too complex for, say, a simple guestbook module, and the process assumes that you are creating a new kind of object that will require persistance. It also requires you to slop code all over your DNN installation, where I wanted to package a up the module a little more cleanly. So I started thinking, “what about the Hello World?” So I wrote one in C#.

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