Hey there,
To be totally honest - unless you have a whole lot of spare time - and an very deep understanding of .net development - looking at the dnn source code will do very little to help you understand how things work.
If you do want to go there - the starting point is default.aspx and default.aspx.vb in the /website/ folder - these are effectively the first files that are called by EVERY page request in a dotnetnuke site -- well along with global.asax.vb in the /website/App_GlobalResources/ folder - and any defined http handlers.
The system is broken into a number of different components some compiled into the core api, some as modules and provides - most of which are compiled into seperate dll's and some parts compile on demand as part of the main web application.
As a result before you try to open the solution you need to do some setting up if you want to work with ALL the code.
Install all the source code files into a new folder
The code that is in the Website folder contains all the code and compiled dll's that make up a LIVE site ... you need to setup IIS and getting the code based on this site RUNNING and live as a website - http://mydnndev.loca/ or some such.
You should now edit the solution's .snl files in a text editor and find the parts that define where this site is hosted:
open
DotNetNuke_Community.VS2008.sln
and look for:
= "DotNetNuke_Community", "http://localhost/DotNetNuke_Community",
and change it to:
= "DotNetNuke_Community", "http://mydnndev.local/", or whatever you called your running site
This will allow visual studio to correctly access the Web Application elements and properly connect to them.
You should now be able to run Visual Studio in Administrator mode and open
DotNetNuke_Community.VS2008.sln
=========================================================================
Now having said this - if what you really want to do is understand how to extend dotnetnuke I would suggest having a look at one of the programming books
http://www.wowebook.com/dot-net/profe... is a good place to start.
The thing to understand is that as a rule you will NEVER modify any of the code in the DotNetNuke source code install. Doing so would break any upgrade paths etc
Instead what you do is create NEW elements that can PLUG IN to the core - these elements come in a number of flavours with varying levels of complexity.
the first is SKINS which are really just html/aspx templates that control layout and style guide css files.
the second are MODULES which add functionality to a site in the form of modules that can be assigned to run on a page.
the third are SKIN OBJECTS which are used to add new functionality to the SKIN.
the fourth are PROVIDERS with are used to extend lower level CORE functionality in areas such as AUTHENTICATION, HTML EDITING, SEARCH, CACHEING, NAVIGATION etc
Westa