I'm an experienced ASP.NET developer who has just recently discovered DNN. It seems like a great tool for cranking out portals and fairly generic sites whose needs are primarily centered around content management.

What I'm most interested to know is how I can best utilize DNN as a framework for more complex, real-world web apps that are built upon custom databases and business rules.  It seems to me that using the DNN framework would, at a minimum, provide the advantage of not having to code a lot of the mundane GUI, user security, et. al. features since they're already built.
I realize my question is very broad, so I don't necessarily expect a detailed reply here, but if someone could direct me to some good, concise documentation/tutorials addressing my needs, I would greatly appreciate it.  I'm sure they're out there, but thought it would probably save me some time asking for directions here.

We have used DNN as a basis for our realworld app at www.homefree.com .  It provided a great launching point.  User and Role administration as well as CMS basics already in the application.

We have made a large suite of custom modules (user controls) that do most of our custom functionality.  These are produced just as fast or faster than standard ASP.NET pages or controls. All the database tables behind the controls are custom and we have our own business rules.   I think Cathal is right in that just going through the documentation is a good start.

I think you will find that if you dive in and make a quickie module and implement it, things fall together really quickly.

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Jeff Martin
MCSD C#

Yes, C# runs great - that is what we use for our custom modules. 

The user controls was in parentheses because modules are just that.  PortalModuleBase inherits from UserControl and all DNN modules inherit from the PortalModuleBase.

You can build your modules with any functionality you could put into a user control. (ie, an infinate possibility)

 

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Jeff Martin
MCSD C#