By Mark Allan on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:23:22 GMT

This is probably embarrassingly simple to a SQL professional, and it’s been around since SQL 2005, but I only discovered it today and it made a noticeable difference to my production databases so I’m going to share it just in case it’s new to anyone else. Run this query on SQL Server 2005 or later and it will list indexes that you could create to improve the query performance of your database, based on the workload of the server since the SQL service last restarted. (The query just lists the indexes, it doesn’t create them!)

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By Mark Allan on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:30:31 GMT

As you probably know, the best way to load jQuery on an internet website is to get it from Google’s CDN. There are three main reasons for this:

Parallelism - Browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections to a single server to avoid overload. Any resource that you fetch from a different server than your own will starting loading immediately, rather than being queued up alongside the images, scripts, CSS etc coming from your main server. Speed - Google’s CDN has many servers in different physical locations, and your user will be automatically directed to the server that will serve their request most quickly. Caching - Most importantly, if the user has already been to a site that uses the same version of hosted jQuery, their browser will already have a local copy and won’t need to download it at all. However, it’s important to make sure that you use the right URL to load jQuery. Let’s suppose my site works with jQuery 1.4.2 (the latest version at the time of writing). I can actually use...

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By Mark Allan on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:35:01 GMT

When I initially set up this site it was simply to share DDRMenu, something I'd developed for my own use on a couple of DNN sites that I look after. It started off great - I got some great feedback that allowed me to add some nice new features and to find bugs that I never would have spotted otherwise, and a few people got to upgrade their old SolPart skins so that they worked in all these fancy new browsers.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the menu then got far more popular than I'd anticipated. People started using it on live sites, including it with commercial skins, and even integrating it with commercial products. This was great for an ego boost, but not so great for spare time!

The real problem came after I went on holiday and came back to a surge of work in the day job, which meant that I basically had to ignore DDRMenu for a couple of months. This caused disgruntlement amongst some DDRMenu users, who somewhat understandably thought that the project had been...

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By Mark Allan on Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:42:26 GMT

Download DDRMenu from www.dnngarden.com

DNN Garden are delighted to announce the release of DDRMenu, the new free templated menu provider for DotNetNuke. Depending on your needs, there are essentially 3 ways you can use DDRMenu, covering the full spectrum from simply improving your existing skin through plugging in a pre-built jQuery / CSS menu to building a completely new menu style using the powerful templating engine:

1. Drop-in upgrade for SolPartMenu and DNNMenu

2. Pre-built templated menus

3. DIY templated menus

Common Features

Some of the features that DDRMenu brings to any DotNetNuke menu are:

• It can display a subset of pages, e.g. top-level only, children of current page, etc
• It can be used as either a module or a skin object
• It supports Apollo page localisation
• It allows you to plug in custom code to alter (or completely replace) the menu structure

What’s coming next?

Now that the core templating engine is stable, I’ll be working on the actual templates. Initially, this will involve improving the mega-menu and completing a new template that provides a simple, easily-stylable dropdown menu with full cross-browser compatibility and some optional effects such as LavaLamp. However, I’ll be happy to listen to any requests, so do head off to the forums and leave your suggestions (and be sure to sign up for updates while you’re there)!

---

Mark Allan (@MarkXA)
DNN Garden

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By Mark Allan on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:45:14 GMT

As you can see, most of the menu templates for the DDRMenu make use of jQuery. We all love jQuery, it makes our sites fast and pretty! Unfortunately, as several people have noticed, even with the jQuery support added in DNN v5 it is still difficult to use jQuery in a DNN module or skin object without running the risk of conflicting with another module on the site that also uses it. The trouble is, when you’re building a module for general distribution any of the following might or might not be the case:

The skin or DNN portal doesn’t load jQuery at all. The skin or DNN portal loads a version of jQuery earlier than the one you need. A module further up the page loads a version of jQuery earlier than the one you need. A module further down the page is going to load a version of jQuery earlier than the one you need and splat your instance. There’s been a bit of community discussion about how best to get around this, so I thought I’d share my approach. Basically, I came to the conclusion that...

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By Mark Allan on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:19:23 GMT

Welcome to the DNN Garden blog! The primary raison d'être of this blog will be to post thoughts on DotNetNuke, jQuery and general .NET related subjects, but it will also contain occasional product announcements and updates. If you’re only interested in the product announcements, there’s a dedicated feed for that.

I will attempt to keep the blog free of rants on Manchester United, beer, religion and politics!