I was helping someone out on twitter today.  They were very upset about DotNetNuke®, claiming that it sucked.  That’s fine.  Everyone thinks that something sucks.  But usually that statement arises as an emotional response to being frustrated by something that should be “simple.”  I agree. All applications should be simple.  However, not everyone gets it right the first time.  Luckily for us, the DotNetNuke® Corporation is fully aware of the usability shortcomings of DNN, and are actively fixing them in each release.  You can easily see evidence of this when comparing version 3.x to version 5.x.

Today’s frustrated DNN user was very upset.  He uploaded an image using the File Manager module, and then couldn’t find the image.  I would suspect that this happens a lot more than we realize.  He assumed that since he uploaded the image to the file manager’s “root” folder, the image would be...

For the first time, there will be a Regional Qualifier for the Florida Microsoft Speaker Idol contest on February 20th.  This contest was announced a few months ago.  Basically, you present a technical presentation on anything “Microsoft” for up to 10 minutes.  User groups all over the state have been participating in this event, and that includes the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG). 

We held our competition at our December meeting where we had several ODUG members give us some great presentations.  However, we rebranded our instance of the event as the DotNetNuke® Speaker Idol.  :)  We made sure to keep our version focused on DNN for obvious reasons, and it worked out really well.  I had more compliments and feedback about this meeting...

About a year and a half ago (maybe more), I noticed this little restaurant pop up near the Florida Mall.  It’s name was Viet Thai Cafe.  I was immediate intrigued since it seemed to combine two of my favorite foods.  I don’t eat either as much as I want to, so this was a treat.  It was conveniently located near my office, so I could drop by for lunches.  I indeed stopped by about a week later, and I brought some people with me.  Unfortunately, this place fell off of my radar, until recently…

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There are times where you might be moving a DotNetNuke® database from one development machine to another.  In these cases, you might also use the data SQL user for your development.  Depending on how you move your databases, this user will still exist in the database itself, but will not exist in the new SQL Server instance.  You might think, “That’s easy! I will just add the missing user.”  Unfortunately, when you do and try to map that user to the imported database, you’ll get a message similar to the one below:

Create failed for user ‘’.

User, group, or role ‘’ already exists in the current database.

Unfortunately, this “existing” user doesn’t really exist.  We need to drop the user from the imported database.  You might try the DROP USER command, but that’d likely greet you with the following error:

Drop failed for user ‘’.

The database principal owns a database role and cannot be dropped.

In many...

It is not uncommon to move from one computer for one reason or another.  When the original PC was also where you blogged, then you will likely want to move your posts as well, so that you can manage them on the new machine.  Another similar use case is when you might work on more than one machine.  If you plan on blogging on both of them, you might want to use Windows Live Writer on both as well. 

Moving your blog posts is easy enough.  There are plenty of blogs that talk about that.  Basically, all that you have to do is move the contents of the following folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\My Weblog Posts - OR - C:\Users\\My Documents\My Weblog Posts

If that’s all you’re looking for, please continue to read on…  There is something you need to know.

If you’re wanting to copy the blog posts across machines, then you’d really want to use a solution such as that spoken about by Antonio Chagoury...

I don’t know about you, but I have begun using jQuery pretty extensively in my UI development.  I know not everyone can, and if you’re in that crowd, I am sooo sorry! :)  jQuery has quite simply and almost single-handedly had an extremely positive impact on all of my web UI.  Through some cool tricks that I’ve picked up here and there, I have created some of the coolest UI’s that I have ever done.  Anyhow, that experience is sure to prove to only get better, as I noticed...

Being the newest Vice President of the prestigious Orlando .Net User Group (ONETUG), I also inherit some responsibility with one of the best code camps in the State of Florida, and perhaps the country!  :)  This time around, I will be helping to drum up and coordinate volunteers for the code camp.  I know you’re already jumping at your screen right now, trying to figure out how you can help, but let me tell...

As of a few days ago, the call for speakers officially opened for this years Orlando Code Camp.  Since it first began 5 years ago, this has been one of the premiere code camps to go to in the State of Florida.  One of the main reasons for this has partially been because we’ve had some really great speakers every year.  When I say “great speakers,” that doesn��t necessarily mean that the speakers were high profile.  It just means...

With the help of INETA, the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) and the Tampa DotNetNuke® User Group were able to bring in Joe Brinkman to speak to us about DotNetNuke®. ...

My latest blog entry was about my trip to Connecticut in 11/2009.  I was so excited about some of my pictures, that I tried to include many of them.  I used the Polaroid Picture plugin for Windows Live Writer for all of them at first.  I thought, “Why not?”  After all, I’ve done this many times before with no problems.  This would prove to not be the case this time around.

I am currently writing on a newly installed instance of Windows 7 at home right now.  It was really great to finally get some personal stuff taken care of to make this possible.  Anyhow, I have nearly all of the programs that I need installed right now, including WLW.  I have even gotten my blog entries all synched up with the cloud, so I can blog from multiple machines, using the same WLW posts.

I said that this experience posting was different because my first post from this machine simply would not go through. ...

Early in the year of 2009, the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group was very fortunate to host the well-known DotNetNuke® SEO Expert, Tom Kraak.  He spoke to use about how we could make our DNN sites more SEO-friendly.  Among many other things, Tom is also a DNN user group leader, in charge of the Connecticut DotNetNuke® User Group.  It’s only fair that if he could fly down to us, that I could make a trip up there to visit them.  That’s just what I did on November 17, 2009.  (A couple of months ago.)

The flight up there was fantastic.  I simply love flying on Southwest.  They are by far my favorite airline.  On our descent, I began to immediately take notice of the differences between Connecticut and Florida.  When you are flying over Florida, it seems that everyone...

If you don’t already know, I live in Orlando, Florida.  This means different things to different people.  First, most people think of the rat.  Well, I guess that’d be Mickey Mouse or Disney to you.  It’s the “RAT” to me, but that’s another story…  Anyhow, it’s been uncharacteristically cold in Central Florida the last few days, and it’s supposed to last through the weekend.  This morning, I got a real good dose of how cold it actually is right now.

I woke up and got ready for work like I usually do when I have to work from the office.  This morning though, there was a small layer of ice on my windshield.  Well, in Florida, we do something that you’d not normally do to fix this.  We get a cup of hot water, and pour it over the windshield.  Problem solved.  Actually, we usually can just use our windshield wipers to get rid of the frost, but that wasn’t working this time.

I poured the hot water, and briskly walked the cup back into the house only to return to my truck windows already beginning to frost...

Joe Brinkman first came to Orlando on DotNetNuke® business a few years ago.  We had a local DNN vendor who sponsored bringing him down to be a speaker at the annual Orlando Code Camp.  Then, he came along with the other DNN Corporation founders to host the OpenForce Connect: Orlando event in 2008.  The last time that we’ve seen Joe visit Florida on DNN business was in June of 2009 for the first annual Day of DotNetNuke® in Tampa.  Well, he’s back!

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