I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.3, available now on our download page. This is primarily a minor bug fix release for issues reported in the forums since the last release, but also introduces alternate Web.config files that allow hosting mojoPortal in ASP.NET 4.0.

Hosting in ASP.NET 4.0 and the Plan for Transitioning to 4.0

Although the current release of mojoPortal is compiled for the 3.5 SP1 .NET framework, it is compatible for hosting under .NET 4.0, but requires different Web.config settings. So basically we have 4 different Web.config files

• Web.config is configured for .NET 3.5 full trust hosting
• Web.mediumtrust.config is meant for .NET 3.5 medium trust hosting
• Web.net4.config is for .NET 4 full trust hosting
• Web.net4.mediumtrust.config is for .NET 4 medium trust hosting

Whichever file you use needs to be named Web.config, so for example to run in .NET 4 medium trust you should rename the Web.config to Web.net35.config and then rename the Web.net4.mediumtrust.config to Web.config

demo.mojoportal.com has been running under .NET 4 for several days now and seems to be working well. My recommendation would be for new installations to use .NET 4 hosting to be future proof. I might hold off a bit before migrating existing installations to .NET 4 but it is time to start thinking about migrating to .NET 4 at some point in the not too distant future.

UPDATE 2010-05-15 Several people have reported problems trying to get mojoPortal working in shared hosting under .NET 4. Therefore I recommend stay with 3.5 hosting until we put out a package compiled for .NET 4.

For developers

In the source code packages and in our svn source code repository, we currently have alternate project and solution files for Visual Studio 2008, but the main projects and solutions have already been converted to Visual Studio 2010. I recommend that everyone begin using Visual Studio 2010 as soon as possible. I will not be keeping the VS 2008 compatible files for long because it is more work to do so. You can also use the free Visual Web Developer Express 2010, so there should be no barrier to moving forward. After eliminating the VS 2008 project and solution files, I will then setup alternate project and solution files for .NET 3.5 and then the main projects and solution can be changed to target .NET 4. Once I do this, we will have to maintain separate release packages for 3.5 and 4.0 .NET and we will have to use conditional compilation to wrap any use of .NET 4 specific features so that we can continue to produce builds for 3.5 .NET. We went through a similar process with the transition from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 back in 2005. it will be more difficult for a while having to manage supporting both 3.5 and 4.0 .NET while beginning to use some of the 4.0 features. We will probably do this for about 1 year and then we will drop the effort to support 3.5 framework. Hopefully this will give most users enough time to migrate to 4.0 .NET hosting.

Miscellaneous

• Implemented option to allow users to choose which editor they prefer if enabled from site settings
• Added setting to allow hiding the search box in forums per community request
• made it possible to use a custom configuration file for the Vertigo Silverlight slideshow used in the Image Gallery and Flickr module, to be documented
• upgrade from NeatUpload 1.3.22 to 1.3.24
• updated Italian Translation from Diego Mora
• added some Codesmith templates for VB.NET in source code package
• some more refinements of TimeZone handling
• previously we had added this to the layout.master file of skins to pre-zoom the screen for iPhone: 
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=670, initial-scale=0.45, minimum-scale=0.45"/>
  this has been removed from existing skins and I recommend you remove it from your layout.master if it is there after upgrading. The reason is that it also affects iPad, but we really don't want to pre-zoom the screen in iPad since the screen is much larger, so now we add this meta element from code only when the request is from iPhone, therefore it does not need to be in the layout.master file
• fixed an issue where the wrong cart could be used if there were more than 1 WebStore in a site
• other miscellaneous bug fixes for things reported in the forums

I'm still working on the series of developer training videos and you can expect to see more of them in May

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Just a quick post to highlight an impressive new site running on mojoPortal. The Metro Transit site for the Minneapolis/St. Paul area is now running on mojoPortal. The site is very attractive and has a lot of custom features developed to support Metro Transit system needs.

John Sanborn, the developer of the site has done a great job with this site and because of all the existing functionality in the mojoPortal framework, was able to focus on developing his needed custom functionality. Quoting John:

I have to tell you, working with mojoPortal has been a joy. Your work is inspiring and all the documentation on the site and access to the forums have really made this whole project so much easier.

The marketing people that manage all the content and input the news and alerts and maintain all the content are pretty excited about all this.

It is great to hear the success stories from our community. If you've done something really impressive with mojoPortal, let us know and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post too!

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.2, available now on our download page. This is primarily a bug fix release, but also, this release marks the move to Visual Studio 2010.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that prevented changing the password format.
• Reverted from TinyMCE 3.3.2 back to version 3.2.7 due to some bugs in the paste as text and paste from word in the newer version.
• Reverted from jQuery 1.4.2 back to 1.4.1 due to a minor bug where a script error would happen in IE if the javascript debugger was enabled such as when working in Visual Studio
• other miscellaneous bug fixes

Miscellaneous

This release will probably be the last one to support MS SQL 2000. Users running on SQL 2000 should plan to upgrade to SQL 2005/2008 soon or use the free Express version of SQL 2008. This will enable us to make the main MS SQL data layer also work for SqlAzure so that we don't have to maintain a separate version just for Sql Azure. The main changes that will be made going forward involve changing from ntext to nvarchar(max) and a few syntax changes in some procedures. ntext is now considered a deprecated data type, it is not supported in Sql Azure. SQL 2000 on the other hand does not support nvarchar(max), thus to move forward we need to be willing to drop support for SQL 2000.

Upgrade from CKeditor 3.2 to 3.2.1

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

Yesterday, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, bringing us to a transition point similar to when we changed from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, and then to Visual Studio 2008. For developers like me who spend their day in Visual Studio, it is always exciting to get the new version. Microsoft really delivers great developer tools and there are always a lot of great improvements in new versions of Visual Studio.

With a project such as mojoPortal that is widely deployed we cannot expect everyone to upgrade their servers or hosting immediately to ASP.NET 4. Therefore we will continue targeting .NET 3.5 SP1 for possibly up to a year to give time for ASP.NET 4.0 hosting to become widely available and to allow time for people to plan migrating or upgrading their hosting environments to ASP.NET 4. However, on the developer side we can immediately begin using Visual Studio 2010. Of course, just as in previous Visual Studio upgrades the project and solution files get upgraded and then can no longer be opened in the older version.

Things are a lot better this time than in previous upgrades because there is a free version of Visual Web Developer Express, that can be used with mojoPortal, so there is nothing holding anyone back from working with the latest mojoPortal using the latest tools. I have created temporary project and solution files that can still be used in Visual Studio 2008. These are named with -vs2008.sln and can still be opened in VS 2008. However I don't plan to keep them around for more than a month or so at most because it is more work maintaining these solutions and projects. So I recommend get yourself the latest version of Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express as soon as you can. It is time to bid a fond farewell to our old friend Visual Studio 2008, it is now officially a legacy tool. Back when Visual Studio 2008 was first released, we had to maintain projects and solutions for Visual Studio 2005 much longer because the free version of Visual Web Developer Express 2008 did not support class library projects until SP1, so we really had no free option available to work with mojoPortal and had to wait for most people to upgrade to VS 2008.

Today is my first day working in Visual Studio 2010, having not tried the betas or release candidate. It definitely feels more modern and smooth than VS 2008. Haven't spent enough time with it yet but so far it seems really nice, I love the ability to peel off a screen and move it to a different monitor!

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