Everyone must begin somewhere. We are all new to something at sometime.
As a secondary school teacher and computer scientist, I would like to be able to pass on my knowledge and experience to higher level students in the hope that they may contribute positively within computing society and become valued members of the computing fraternity.
Imagine my delight at having an integrated framework to hang so much of taught technology on. Imagine my frustration at not being able to achieve the most basic of tasks, the installation of DotNetNuke.
Being able to set up a basic webserver on an MS platform, keeping it as simple as possible, being able to run IIS and .Net frameworks, having exciting (cut down) software such as the MS express editions of languages, database servers and development environments really empowers my teaching, skills and enthusiasm which is naturally passed on to students.
Once again I find myself in the position of having to trawl through forums, seeking advice and assistance (which is normally solved by setting some parameter or switch). I am quite happy to spend many an hour researching solutions to complicated problems - I am less than happy to waste time trawling sites for information on how to manage a basic installation of software in a common environment. Sure if I was trying to tweak Linux to perform MS tasks - I would expect a bit of a nightmare.
My advice & teaching to students would be to look for another product - citing that if the product has not been fully tested, if the documentation is not helpful then its reliability and integrity are in question.
With so much material available both electronically and in paper I can only assume that the DotNetNuke project is worthy of merit, that the developers can only be congratulated for such a superb product. With this in mind, I shall perservere to get the product up and running, inform my students that this is the future and worth studying. Unfortunately, several hours/days/weeks may pass before I manage to get my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Having read the forums, the most likely cause of my problems is with case sensitivity between the scripts and the database. If this is the case (pun not intented) it is with absolute disbelief that neither a warning, a guide, a fix or some other easy method of preventing a waste of valuable time and resources is not available.
So, it is to tutorials about changing collation and the like that I find myself turning to. It would have been nice to be evaluating, learning and teaching the product - hopefully that will come.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to install this product, then help would be greatfully received.
W2K3 R2 OS, IIS6, Express 2008 editions of C#, VB, C++, VWD, SQLServer2008 Express with advanced whatnots, DotNetNuke Starter kit, .Net3.5 & 2.0 installed