We just barely beat out the ice and cold weather to have yet another great meeting. We also had some fun with the Microsoft security as they switched our rooms at the last minute and we had to modify & adjust.
DNNCon With Joe Craig
You love it, you want it, and now you know when it will happen! We had the host of the upcoming DNNCon, Joe Craig, join in for a bit to give us some details of the upcoming conference. DNNCon will be held on Saturday, April 2nd with a day of training held before the conference on Friday, April 1st. There will also be a welcome reception on Friday evening. Joe also mentioned that there will again be Ignite sessions at the event!
The conference will be held at the Sheraton Columbia Town Center hotel in Columbia, Maryland. And for those of you who may not know where Maryland is its a few hours north of Charlotte and much colder. Though, since the majority of the events will happen in the hotel we should be able to stay warm.
We hope to see you at DNNCon. Be sure to register online at DNNCon.com
DNN 8 With Joe Brinkman
After Joe Craig spoke about DNNCon we had Joe Brinkman of bobblehead fame join us to go spelunking around DNN v8. Joe referenced the GitHub link for the project and that was where everything started from https://github.com/dnnsoftware and he also mentioned https://github.com/dnncommunity which holds repositories for community based modules.
Joe then broke into an MVC module dev discussion. One interesting note was that he used Microsoft’s new Visual Studio Code for his module project. Joe’s session was informative especially if you like to develop using MVC.It’s great that DNN 8 supports MVC development as this is a popular style among developers in today’s world. Here again DNN is adjusting to handle recent trends in technology!
Joe then spoke about the new JWT support in DNN 8. JWT stands for “JSON Web Tokens” and they make security around authentication for a REST based API simple and effective. Currently in order to use DNN’s implementation of web services one needs to have developed a DNN module. With the integration of JWT developers will be able to integrate with DNN’s web services without developing a DNN module. Joe noted that this was the “web friendly” way as someone could authenticate even if cookies weren’t native to their application. As cookies are typically thought of as part of the browser an example of a use case would be with a mobile app. Using JWT was the final solution after OAuth and HMAC had been considered. Joe also mentioned that if you use JWT you definitely need to use SSL as information passed is not encrypted. You can find out more info about JWT at https://jwt.io and Joe noted that there is a webinar focused on JWT and there will be more info on the DNN implementation of JWT forthcoming.
SPA Module Overview with Ralph Williams
After Joe Brinkman spoke we were joined by DNN published author Ralph Williams. Ralph’s background is in front end work and he is well-known in the community for his work. He’s given trainings, wrote blog articles, answered forum posts, and yes even wrote a chapter in the DNN 7 book all regarding DNN skinning and front-end work. Ralph overviewed his recent Single Page Application (SPA) Module.
However, recently Ralph has crossed the great divide and journeyed into the land of module development. Ralph has learned a lot and has created a really neat DNN SPA module that uses Angular. In our session Ralph dropped knowledge on how he achieved this and gave us all an overview of his newly updated SPA module. Along with the session Ralph let us hear some South Florida crickets chirping.
Ralph’s module has a really slick user interface and what was interesting to me was that he’s essentially referencing all his JS scripts and then creating one DIV in his module’s view and from within that DIV Angular does all the work. It definitely a different style of module development. In order to get all the DNN goodness Ralph is getting the “module context” info from DNN tokens and turning them into JS variables as shown below.
Ralph also spoke of the challenges faced with localizing the module. To get around this he got some info from community legend Peter Donker who has worked some magic so that localization can happen through an API. Ralph did a great job presenting and inspired several in the audience and in the online GoToMeeting.
If you’re interested in learning more about SPA development be sure to attend DNNCon!
Check out the meeting video below if you want to watch the replay…