Well, I have tried Chris' templates. I think that, once I understand the procedures more clearly, Chris'templates may be the preferred ones.

But right now, I am going through the next chapters in the WROX book, about the data layer, and then I will try to understand the business logic layer. This is missing with Chris' templates. The Christoc templates give a completly empty project. Where I am now in my learning curve, I appreciate the code in the Starter Kit very much because it gives me a basis to continue my efforts.

There are a few differences between the two approaches. The WROX strategy spends a lot of time and effort explaining how to include the company name in the setup of your solution. The Christoc templates skip over this procedure, with a different structure of the sources as result and with most likely differences in the underlying code that may be evident for the experienced developer, but daunting for the beginner.

So, at this point in time, I will rather stick with the Starters Kit and WROX manual. There is actually not so much outdated in the chapter Beginning Module Development. There is one modification in the SqlDataProvider file. The other problem I had is because WROX manual is unclear on one point.

After  the creation of the DataProviders project, the book states that errors will go away when you compile the solution. They do not. The errors go away when you replace all occurrences of YourCompany.

"Open one of your companies" the book states, "(for example ViewFirstModule.aspx) and search the entire solution for the YourCompany placeholder and replace it. There was only one occurrence in ViweFirstModule.aspx. Changing that one occurrence caused a list of errors. Of course, the aspx file is not the same thing as the code page in Windows Forms development, is is more like the hidden design page.

The replacement of "all occurrences" should happen in the ViewFirstModule.ascx.vb file and that was not clear in the book. Just a suggestion, for when somebody reworks the book to become Professional DotNetNuke 5.9 or anything alike...

Today, I attack the data layer. Stay tuned for my comments.

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The one-eyed in the land of the blind.

Nice tool, dnnbuilda, but it has far too much features for what I need yet too limited in the applications it produces. But as a learning tool, it is great. My SQL practice was a bit rusty, and this helped me dust-off my recollection. Maybe I should play around with it a little more, just to see if it gives me new ideas.
 
Anyway, I think I've got the dataprovider part setup without notable trouble. The dataprovider system is much easier than I had feared. I had quite some trouble finding a way to get at the current culture of the page. I had setup my database in the expectation that I would have been able to provide a pointer into the table dbo.Languages and I had to rework it all to use a char(5) column. But that will work just as well for what I had in mind.

Tomorrow the business logic part. I hope to start up the counter as Newyear midnight.

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The one-eyed in the land of the blind.