I'm an experienced .NET developer but I'm new to DNN.  I have it installed and working pretty well.  I'm digging through the source and tweaking a few small things to my liking here and there.  I've been able to do this so far on things in \Admin\Skins without issue.  That's been easy because I'm making changes directly to the source and it appears to be jitted with no other compile steps necessary.

Now I'm getting to the point where I'd like to make some changes to modules - namely the News Feeds (RSS) module.  I'm currently running v04.00.01.  A number of the feeds I've tried just provide a generic "Feed could not be loaded.  Error: Download error."  I'd like to try my hand at digging into the module to see what specifically is generating the errors.  I'm not questioning the module - I'm sure the errors result from malformations within the feeds or something.  But I would like to be able to dig into those details and see what specific issues are being encountered.  The thought is that I can either handle those issues or create an XSLT to accommodate those issues prior to the parsing by the module itself.

I've downloaded the source code for the module from CodePlex but it doesn't build.  I get 102 errors and a number of additional warnings.  I assume these errors are because of dependencies on the core framework.  Where do I need to unzip the Resources.zip in relation to the framework in order to be able to successfully build it?  Or am I going about this the wrong way?  Any assistance and direction is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

First, welcome to the DNN Community.

Now, as Sebastian mentions, you'll need to install DNN to be able to re-compile the News project.  Reason being there are some references to the Core DNN code that you will need to add to the Project.  Basically, there are 3 that I am aware, and this is some content from my blog that discusses what I did.  Check out the blog for a bit more on the subject, though it's not a complete tutorial, hope it gets you started.

...the missing ingredient in all of my troubles was just to add the missing references in the project.

If you are using MS VWD 2008, it is possible to make your own changes to the News module. Open up the project in VWD2008, and add the references for the following dlls located in the folder where you put dnn \Website\Bin\:

DoteNetNuke.dll
DotnNetNuke.WebUtility.dll
Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.Data.dll

Then, try a quick rebuild before making any changes. If your setup is acceptable, the project will rebuild successfully, then the module will be ready for more changes. If you have errors, there may be other references to add, but those are the only ones I needed to add.

Thanks for the welcome!

I have DNN installed.  As I said in my original post, I'm able to build the core DNN code without issue.  I've even made minor tweaks and I'm able to see those changes like I would expect.

I'll be a few more days before I can get back to this but I'll check out your blog and see if adding those references helps.  I should have included in my original post, I'm using VS2008 EA (I think) and Vista.  The errors I'm seeing do appear to be indicative of missing references so hopefully that'll resolve everything.  If not... I'll be back.  :)  Maybe those references were in a readme somewhere that I missed, but having that available somewhere would have been very helpful.  I would assume the references required could be different for every module so thinking ahead, if/when I want to start digging into other modules I'm going to be asking the same questions about those modules.

Anyway... thanks for the tip.  I'll give it a shot and let you know in a few days what I learn.  Thanks again.