Joe Brinkman wrote:
Patrik,
Please log a bug in Jira on the specific issues you are seeing in the DNN_PlatformNoTests.sln. I have not personally tested this solution so I am sure you are seeing legitimate bugs in that area since the team primarily develops with the main solution.
IISExpress is something new that was only really possible once we converted the website to use Web Application Project (WAP). I have a number of PowerShell scripts that I use for installation and configuration of most of my environment and have been doing things a certain way for 10 years. I also prefer IIS because I can run the website without starting up Visual Studio or any other tools. I do a lot more demo/test scenarios than I do pure dev work so for me IIS is a better choice.
As for release/development.config getting copied to web.config - that is something we have been doing for at least the last five or six years. Often we organize files so there is the least possibility for a failure to result in data loss. For example, if you have a web.config in the root project and you build the DNN Upgrade package, you have to explicitly remember to remove the web.config as part of the build. If you fail to do so, you can overwrite someones web.config and cause them to lose a machinekey which would completely kill all the user accounts (the hashing algorithm for passwords depends on machinekey). Conversely, if you forget to copy release/development.config to web.config in the case of a new Install build package, this is an easily recoverable issue and one that is quickly identified in QA.
As for the DB name - I do that because I don't have SQL express installed. I run with full SQL Server. There is some configuration issue on my machine which means that when DNN doesn't find SQLExpress in the default install, it gives me an error rather than showing the InstallWizard. Other people don't have this problem and I have not taken the time to track down the root cause. Since I mostly do installs from PowerShell, it is not something I normally have to deal with.
Joe,
I've stopped trying to use the DNN_PlatformNoTests.sln as I have never been able to get it to work. Not sure how helpful it would be to report just "DNN_PlatformNoTests.sln isn't working". I would probably rather recommend to remove the DNN_PlatformNoTests.sln altogheter, don't see the point of having it as it never seem to work anyway (at least it never has for me).
I don't see it as a IISExpress or IIS, I have both set up with my development environment so that I can choose which I want to run and it is nice not being forced to run Visual Studio as Administrator all the time.
The web.config might have been me being confused, even if you you don't manually create one by renaming release.config or development.config one gets created, this might be by Visual Studio itself. Really not that often that I run a web site without a web.config so I'm really don't know how Visual Studio handles this.
I also use the full SQL server and have always done so. In the past this hasn't been a problem with the Installation Wizard which of course seems logical as the Installation Wizard is where you are supposed to configure you connection string with a new installation. So having to set the connection string to get the possibility to set the connection string is a bug. Not a problem for us developers to work around, but might be if the same problem exist with installation packages.
Not sure how the testing of new DNN packages are performed and who is responsible for that, but I hope that at least they don't use a special setup with Powershell but a setup more similar to what a "normal" DNN site owner would use. That said, I don't really know these days how much open source DNN still is and how much is managed by the DNN Corporation. Have been away from DNN for a few years now and isn't really up to speed with how development is done these days. If it is still maintained mostly by people using their own time without compensation, we naturally can't expect the same service.