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I've been away for a while, last developing during DNN5. I wanted to upgrade my CodeSmith module templates and get a number of my older modules up to DNN7 from the DNN4/5 where they started. To be frank, absolutely nothing has worked. Any attempt to go past the bare minimum few fields or have multi-table modules has crashed and burned. Even attempting to refactor old DNN4/5 modules "as is" has ended up with nothing but module load exceptions. At this point my opinion of DNN as a viable development platform is extremely negative. There doesn't seem to be any real reference material, and the volumes of videos show very basic scenarios that when you update them seem to fail. After working on DNN since the version 2 days I'm really doubting there's an ecosystem outside of DNNCorp to build anything. It also seems like DNNCorp is deliberately withholding information from developers to keep the value-add in the "Professional" and "Enterprise" subscriptions. 

At this point is seems like the best option is to develop for DNN5 where there's real documentation and you can get things to work. DNN7 seems terribly twitchy, and all the examples given only seem to work with a very restricted set of circumstances. I built templates off Scott's examples and DAL2 does't work with more than a handful of columns, the ColumnName decorations don't work, anything other than a single column integer primary key doesn't work, and when they don't work you don't get an error and you're only option is loading the full source and stepping line by line. Personally if I've got to debug the CMS on my own it lacks value. If I'm going to develop to a brain-dead CMS I might as well use SharePoint because at least I can get some support.

Based on my earlier experiences I don't see much traffic on any of the development forums. Has everyone bailed and I'm just the last guy to figure it out? 

Scott,

I've been through all your development videos, DAL videos, client centric videos, etc. They are great for learning but when I take what I learn from the videos along with examples and attempt to apply it to "real" situations I hit roadblock after roadblock. For example:

All the work using DAL2 failed. Petapoco won't do anything at all when I use the ColumnName decoration, and when I remove it and force all the properties in the model to match the database it still refuses to map correctly, although it will retrieve rows. Somewhere between the half dozen columns in the examples and the 30 or so in my tables things break and all petapoco does is silently logs something to the event log that says basically nothing. Object reference not found.

All the work moving an old VB module "as is" as much as possible also failed. None of the .ascx will load and punt with a module load exception, so you can't even debug. Even .ascx straight from the Christoc VB template in the same project punt with the same error once I add a control. 

Even taking the simple CS DAL2 template and attempting to alter the controls on the view to use the new fields from a database view failed, absolutely nothing happens, but I suspect that's due to having the column decorations there. I haven't had a chance to go back and redo this test by removing the ColumnName decorations, so maybe one simple thing will work.

In any case not having any usable reference material makes this slow and tedious, and I really don't have the time to do everything hunt and peck. Maybe there's some magic extra decoration that needs to be there to get ColumnName decorations to work, but without a manual or equivalent the only hope I have is finding something in some example somewhere. The fact that the DNN petapoco implementation choses to silently log errors with no indication how to repair them leads me to believe it's not ready for prime time.