This page details how to setup a local development environment.

Requirements:

• Visual Studio 2008
• SQL Server or SQL Server Express
• IIS
• Latest version of DotNetNuke

In my case, I'm running my development environment on a Windows Vista Enterprise laptop. Your development environment setup milage may vary, but I'm hoping that walking through how I set up my machine will help others.

Working from a clean laptop, I did the following:

• Install Visual Studio 2008 (non-Express edition)
  • Install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer
• Install SQL Server 2005 (regular or Express)
• Setup IIS with IIS6 compatibility

I installed the above because the DNN installation is set up to build out a DNN Public Assembly (PA). You can use Visual Studio Express and not use IIS if you want to run DNN from the Starter Kit model - or run DNN as a whole, but compiling the DNN PAs as DLLs that can be downloaded and installed as compiled code requires a non-Express edition of Visual Studio. You could - in theory - use Visual Studio Express if you built out the setup differently.

I then set up my development environment (Michael Washington has a good walkthrough on the topic):

• Create the DNN Development directory (I used 'C:\DnnDev')
• Modify the DNN Development directory to give the 'Users' group 'Modify' rights (Read, Write, Execute)
• Create directories for the DNN environment and development
  • DNN Directory (I used 'C:\DnnDev\Dnn-Dvlp-v4')
  • WGR Development Directory (I used 'C:\DnnDev\Source Code')
• Modify the DNN Directory to give the 'ASPNET' and 'NETWORK SERVICE' users 'Full control' rights
• Create the DNN website (below assumes IIS7 / Vista)
  • Open up the IIS Manager
  • Navigate to 'Default Web Site'
  • Right click on 'Default Web Site' and select 'Add Application'
  • Give it an alias along the lines of 'DnnDvlp4x'
  • Click the button to 'Select...' the application pool, and select 'DefaultAppPool' from the drop down
  • In the 'Physical Path' text box, select the directory above (for me, it is 'C:\DnnDev\Dnn-Dvlp-v4')
  • For the '/DnnDvlp4' website, select 'IIS' -> 'Authentication' and then enable 'Basic Authentication'
• Create the DNN Database (below assumes SQL Server 2005; skip if Express)
  • Open up SQL Server Management Studio and connect to your local database engine
  • Create a new database with a name along the lines of 'DnnDvlp4x' (I created it with a 20mb data and 5mb log file)
  • Create a new login using the same name as the database, and set them up as a SQL Server user and remove the password enforcement (we don't want to have to worry about changing passwords for our development database)
  • Once the user is created, open the login again to edit it - select 'User Mappings' and check the box next to the database and give the user db_owner priviledges. Then return to the 'General' settings and set your development database as the default database for the user. Once these are set, save the settings.

Now that we have the system ready, let's start setting up DNN and getting everything working.

• Install DNN v4
  • Grab the 'Install' package, if you haven't already
  • Unzip it into your DNN directory (for me, 'C:\DnnDev\Dnn-Dvlp-v4')
  • Once installed open up the site in your web browser (for me, 'http://localhost/DnnDvlp4/') and it will walk you through the installation wizard to set up the installation
• Download the PA from this CodePlex project to set up the database schema and proper directory structure.
  • Download and place the 'AjaxControlToolkit.dll' in your BIN directory
  • Follow the instructions to install the PA
• Download and open up the source code
  • Open up Visual Studio and select 'Open' | 'Team Project'
  • Add the CodePlex TFS server if necessary. To get the server information for this project, I had to log into CodePlex and then select the 'Source Code' tab of this project, you can then select the Team Explorer option and it will list server name, port, and your TFS login information.
  • Select 'WowGuildRoster'
  • Using the Team Explorer app, create a workspace (if needed - this can be accessed using the 'Workspaces' drop-down in the Source Control Explorer window) and map it to the local 'C:\DnnDev\Source Code' folder
  • Right-click on the 'DotNetWarcraft.WowGuildRoster' folder and select 'Get Latest Version'
  • Close the project and then, within VS2008, select 'Open' | 'Project', and browse to the 'DotNetWarcraft.WowGuildRoster.sln' in the 'C:\DnnDev\Source Code\DotNetWarcraft.WowGuildRoster' folder, and click 'Open'
  • Fix the references in all the projects
  • To set up the publication location, right-click on the 'UI.DNN' project and select 'Publish...' and, click the browse button ('...') for the target location - and browse to your Desktop Modules folder (for me, 'C:\DnnDev\Dnn-Dvlp-v4\DesktopModules\DNW-WoWGuildRoster')

After all that - you're now set to code! Yay!