Had a narrow escape today. Installed DNN 3.0.9 and updated the site I'm working on at home. Just after finishing up some menus and pages, I decided to set the re-direction of who sees what page. So this way ordinary users get directed to, say, the main page, registered users, on logging in, may get directed to a special page with announcements and news for members. Anyway, for some reason, there is also an option to direct the LOGIN menu somewhere other than the Login page (perhaps to an enriched login module ?). In retrospect, I'm not sure this should even be allowed cos it can lock you out of the site if you are not careful.
I accidentally directed the login page, from a default of [NOT SPECIFIED] to [HOME]. Since I was doing this in a hurry, I didnt stop to think of the fall out. As a consequence, whenever I clicked the Login link, it just showed me the home page and never allowed me to log in. It took me a while to realise what I had done and in the meantime I restarted IIS, backed up and restored the DB, all to no avail.
Anyway finally it dawned on me where I could go and check. Sure enough, in the Portals table the Tab ID's for each of those options are shown. I tried setting the LoginTabID column to 41 which is the actual TabID for the User Accounts module, but that didnt work. It turns out that it has to be updated to NULL to allow the login screen to be shown.
The lesson therefore, boys and girls, is that DB hacking on your own system can be invaluable :-). [Of course, common sense is even better!! If i had done the configuration mistake with the site being hosted by an ISP, that would have been the end - in terms of experimentation. There is a SQL module in the Host option, but the ISP may not give enough DB permissions to do this kind of stuff].
A Note on 3.x Menus: It's also worth noting that the new fancy Horizontal and Vertical menu styles are available in all the skins out of the box in 3.x. Of course, if you load a 2.x skin, it wont have these new structures, but most 2.x skins work if they have been developed correctly. Probably also good to mention that you need to be logged in as host to upload new skins. Admins dont appear to have enough permissions (or maybe thats just some settings playing up).
I seem to have lost the link to the page which listed all the tools that will become endangered or obsolete species by the advent of VS2005 (and yes, the list included Re-Sharper).
If someone else has read that post and knows the link would you please send it to me ?
Thanks in advance.
Looks like some of this information is now in the public domain. As most of us BTS users know HWS aint going very far. But whats more interesting is that it will soon die an official death. Just like WSS (or an extension to it), there is going to be an Orchestration Engine baked into Windows and newer versions of BizTalk will build on top of it.
This is actually pretty good since most products need orchestration and workflow and MS CRM, SharePoint, BTS etc can all do with one. In fact it would be easier to make simple workflow applications with just InfoPath and WinOE / WSS.
Some of the posts also mention that there is speculation that MS will buy out K2 completely. (Or maybe they will just help K2 to build a more enhanced product on top of WinOE). That may not be good news for K2 (although it might be alright for K2 users if they are provided with migration and upgrade tools), but from a license cost point of view, it does help quite a bit since we dont have to consider an add-on product just to do workflow. I dont favor be-spoke development for this and I would opt for a tool like K2 any day in the current environment, but if its going to be baked into Windows, thats a nifty cost saver.
Whatever the outcome of all this, there are some very interesting days ahead for all of us.
Whew! Was just working through the BTS Unleashed book to prepare a demo for some folk next week and the amount of errors/typos/missing instructions in the sample orchestration project in the second chapter is awful. I had to strike out so many things and make notes in the margin.
I should probably start collecting the Errata and inform Sams Publishing and Scott to correct the errors when they bring out the revised edition. Do you think a collection point like this would be useful to you? Is there one already or should I go ahead and start one? Do send me your thoughts on this.
A strange thing i found was with the Orchestration Diagram and the presence of drop downs inside the shapes! That never happens inside VS.NET 2003 (including BTS SP1). Is that from the Visio ODX designer? I havent tried that out so maybe it is. Its not a big issue for people with some experience of BTS but i can definitely throw a newbie off for a while.