Imagine our surprise when we first started deploying reports some 8 months ago in DotNetNuke and we could never see a ‘spinny’ for any of our reports. Sure when we developed them and did the preview we would get one and when we deployed them on pages outside of DNN we saw it but we could never figure out why, in DNN, it would never show. Until IE8 came out, that is.

IE8 has a wonderful little feature called Compatibility Mode and combined with Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) we were able to notice that the spinner appeared when the site was switched from Compatibility mode and back to regular but not when the page first loaded.  Forcing the site to load everything again with Alt + F5 seemed to make the spinner appear as well. Watching fiddler while doing this we saw a few things happen. JavaScript files appeared to be reloaded and CSS files appeared to be reloaded. This made us think that maybe some little bit of bad JS or some malformed CSS was causing the ‘spinny’ to not show. So we stripped...

Where I work, yes I sometimes work, full time we have run without ssl for a long time. In some ways it was a lack of need in others it was a lack of understanding of why we need it, not on my part but sometimes management still thinks like its 1970. Finally this last week we have gone through the painful process of putting security on all our public facing websites. Doing so always brings out legacy problems and the little quirks in your code and sometimes in other third party services. One of those quirks turned out to be Google Charts.

Google Charts doesn’t work over ssl it simply redirects to Google.com. We needed a solution to avoid panicking our users with the dreaded "some content came from an unsecured page" warning in the browser. After some research we wrote this little http handler to grab the chart and stream it to the page under ssl.

In order to use the HttpHandler we simply added a class to the App_Code folder but you could easily compile it to its own assembly if you wanted.

Add...

Some users have the wrong idea of why they are forced to log in to a site. Well if you only want to have them log in once and not be logged out while the site is in the browser here is one way. This is above and beyond the 'Remember Login' checkbox and really good for long data entry forms!

Great article on fixing a small SEO problem in DNN from Eguana Solutions - if you are serious about making the DNN sitemaps reflect the correct priority of your pages this is a start.