r.a.d.controls and support for DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke 4.0 was officially released about a month ago, giving a major revamp to the project, now specifically designed for .NET 2.0 and offering Visual Studio 2005 support. Although there were some inevitable glitches, in my opinion DNN 4.0 is a solid release.

Porting the existing r.a.d.controls for DNN to 4.0 proved to be a straightforward task. Almost all our DNN controls compiled right away after simply replacing the old .NET 1.1 assemblies with the 2.0 ones (e.g. RadEditor.dll -> RadEditor.NET2.dll). The main task was to simplify the new distributions by taking advantage of the new functionality offered by .NET 2.0. All skinobjects and modules are now part of the DotNetNuke website project and do not need projects of their own. There is no more need to recompile anything when either the DNN module or our control is updated. All errors related to old/missing references should be gone too. Development is also simplified since the size of the DotNetNuke solution does not grow when adding new modules. Seeing that Visual Studio.NET 2005 has some speed issues with the DNN solution (even on my development machine with 1GB RAM and a fast CPU), it is important to keep it as simple as possible.

The only DNN project that remained virtually the same in DNN 3.2 and 4.0 is our r.a.d.editor HtmlEditor provider. Like all other controls it is converted to use the new .NET 2.0 version of r.a.d.editor, but it is still a separate project in the solution.

telerik will keep supporting both the 3.x and 4.x branches of DotNetNuke as long as there are new releases. Every DNN archive you download will include two folders – Net1 for DNN 3.x and Net2 for DNN 4.x.