Chapter 12. Beginning Module Development

This chapter begins the tour of custom module development in DotNetNuke. As you have seen in previous chapters, DotNetNuke provides a significant amount of functionality right out of the box. Nevertheless, each user will have unique business requirements that standard DotNetNuke functionality may not meet. Fortunately, DotNetNuke (DNN) provides developers and third-party independent software vendors (ISVs) the capability to extend the core framework by developing custom modules.

This chapter discusses the decision-making process surrounding the development of custom modules, and then focuses on the architecture and design setup of a sample module, the WROX.Suggestion module. Chapters 13 through 15 cover the architectural layers used for module development in more detail. You begin by setting up your module project to interact with DotNetNuke in Visual Studio 2008, exploring some configuration issues along the way.