AppTheory has reserved its booth for the 2008 Open Force in Las Vegas -- Nov 10-13.

DotNetNuke provides the News Feeds module out of the box to consume Rss. It will also allow you to style the display of the feed via XSLT. This is a great starting point for Rss feed consumption, but sometimes the may not allow you granular enough control of the consumption. Furthermore,at times you may want to embed this functionality within your module. There are already quite a few libraries out there such as RSS.NET and the RSS Toolkit that can handle this functionality for you, and if you have no restrictions that prohibit their use then by all means do not reinvent the wheel. However, sometimes you may not be able to bundle third party libraries with your module due to client restrictions, licensing restrictions, or any number of other reasons. In this scenario its always nice to be able to handle this functionality on your own. Below is a quick and dirty way to achieve just that using the XmlDataSource as the data source of a databound control.

Alternative methods for testing on various operating systems or various browsers that you don't have immediate access to

Add a blog to your DotNetNuke site, for the win!

Skin objects are a great way to integrate functionality in your DotNetNuke portal site wide. This can be helpful if you would like to provide a custom search for your modules, etc. In a recent ecommerce project we working on we needed to provide a search skin object to facilitate the searching of products. Sure, you can implement ISearchable in your module and then use the DotNetNuke core search. However, sometimes project requirements dictate additional functionality needs not provided by the DNN core search. DotNetNuke skin objects inherit from a different base class than DotNetNuke modules do. Modules inherit from the PortalModuleBase while skin objects inherit from SkinObjectBase. One issue that you may run into when creating a skin object is the need to get the PortalId of the current portal. There are several reasons you may need PortalId such as locating module instances, etc. The SkinObjectBase does not expose PortalId directly as a public property like PortalModuleBase, however there is a way to get this value. In order to access this value (and other usefule ones) take a look at PortalSettings.ActiveTab. From this you can get both PortalId and TabId which are needed quite often when using any of the DotNetNuke core methods.