The SRC (source) package for DNN8 BETA1 is broken, it's missing several important files like the installwizard that handles first time installation.

https://dotnetnuke.codeplex.com/releases/view/619000

 

I'm actually kind of impressed, during 10+ years of .NET development I have NEVER seen anything that can crash the IIS in this way. It's not just the exceptions in the .NET code here we are talking about, the entire IIS process crashes and dies. Install version seem to work much better though, almost so I wonder if that has a different codebase compared to the SRC one. Scary.

Patrik,

  I have gone through the beta package from CodePlex and it is working exactly as expected.  The biggest problem for most people trying to build DNN from source is that they don't understand how the source is organized or how our build process works.  We often copy files to different directories during the build process to get around some issues with ASP.Net and Visual Studio.  For example, to minimize security risks, DNN will delete the Install Wizard after the installation is complete.  In the development environment this results in Git thinking that want to delete the file and can result in someone inadvertently checking in the deletion into GitHub.  To avoid this, we keep the install wizard in a separate location and copy it into the Install folder during the build process.  Since it gets deleted on install, the net result is that Git is happy and we don't worry about someone accidentally checking in a delete.

The other major issue is that most people don't do "Release" build before attempting to install.  The release build is critical for us since that is the build where we package up all the modules which are needed during install.  Typically I will do a debug build to generate the PDBs and to create a debug version of the web.  When that is done, I will do a release build to create all the various module packages.  Once that is done I am free to run the actual installation.

 I have a short (~8 min) video (no audio) which shows you the full process using the DNN 8 Beta source package from CodePlex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAUvQ...

 Note:  As DNN 8 uses C# 6.0 constructs in a number of locations you will need to use Visual Studio 2015 to compile DNN.

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Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.