Site Rewritten in ASP.Net
14 Aug 2006I’m back after a week of building a new site. If you have been here before you’ll notice the site looks a little different. I’ve abandoned DotNetNuke and went to writing in Asp.Net directly. Having never done written in Asp.Net before, there was a bit of a learning curve. Still, with some effort I was able to produce a new site with most of the content of the old site.
Asp.Net is an interesting technology. Having been a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) hack for a number of years, it was refreshing to use an environment that has built in features I usually implement myself. I’m sure I have not written my site in an optimal fashion given my limited knowledge of Asp.Net, but I still was able to take advantage of caching and master pages and XML translation controls. There’s a lot to like about ASP.Net.
So why did I abandon DotNetNuke? In a word, stability. I kept noticing all sorts of odd behavior and bugs that kept me from doing things I wanted to do. Also, I ran into a situation where it would not let me add any new modules. I tried debugging the problem for a while but concluded my time was better spent writing the site in something I controlled and understood. I like the idea of content management systems but it would seem that in the case of DotNetNuke it has a ways to go.
One thing I don’t like is the seemingly broken Publish Wizard in VS 2005. I tried a couple times to get it to work only to have the IDE hang. I finally just FTP’ed the whole site up. Seems like they have some work to do there.