In late 2001 and early 2002 many programmers eagerly
awaited the arrival of the new Visual Studio 2002. VS 2002 was
a major jump from Visual Studio 6.0 as it a moved away from
tradition Windows API manipulation toward the implementation
of the newer .NET-based APIs. Microsoft warned
developers the COM-based APIs were now being phased out.
It was a disappointing time for many developers, all those
years of learning the Windows APIs (User, GDI and Kernel)
were now basically a waste of time and we had a long road
ahead. The many tweaks and hacks we had worked out were
now defunct but in return Microsoft was offering a radical
shift from workstation computing to distributed computing,
the benefits were being hailed as ground-breaking. Part of this
strategy included a major revamp of their Visual Studio. The
newer .NET version was to be more Internet-centric and was
to look toward the development of remote server based
solutions. Some other major changes included changes to
languages such as VB.NET, which were now to follow object
orientated methods more closely, more extensive use of XML,
added languages such as C#, mobile device support and, of
course, the introduction Web Services (SOAP). VS 2002 was
probably the most exciting advancement since the jump from
a 16 to 32-bit environment in Visual Studio 4.0., but developers
had a lot to learn. One of the side benefits of this whole
process however, was the development of a new open source
portal system named DotNetNuke. In this article I would like
to showcase this new portal and well as some of its benefits of
its underlying framework (i.e. NET)