Last night I installed Dot Net Nuke 4.0.2 on my system. It gave me almost as much trouble as a Linux web application install. The two aspects I found tricky were renaming the release.config file to web.config and then updating the database connection string in two places in the web.config file instead of just one place. Dot Net Nuke has been on my radar for awhile now. It is an ASP.NET web application framework that many web developers like to use because it gives them much of the functionality they would need to create from scratch if not using DNN. However I come across a lot of uncompleted projects that were started using Dot Net Nuke. I get the impression that developers use it to give the impression that a project is well under way and then they abandon the client. Customizing Dot Net Nuke for the specific functionality a project requires is probably very difficult and developers either bail at that point or find other work and leave a project that the client finds difficult to get completed.
I also played around with Crystal Reports. Crystal Reports has been in Visual Studio.NET for a long time but I never looked at it. I’m not particularly impressed. I don’t like the report formats or the report design tools. I would rather create my own reports using HTML and make them as plain or fancy as I please. I don’t like to fiddle with imprecise positioning of window boxes and text controls in Visual Studio’s terrible design view.
