The aim of this article is to configure Visual Studio 2003 for the creation of DotNetNuke modules. Firstly if you are reconfiguring Visual Studio after a previous failed setup then you will need to delete the folder in the VSWebCache directory for the relevant project (C:\Documents and Settings\MYUSERNAME\VSWebCache\MYCOMPUTERNAME).
Now double click the visual studio project file DotNetNuke.sln in the dotnetnuke directory. The location of this file will be dependant upon where you installed dotnetnuke to, but is likely to be C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\dotnetnuke. This will add dotnetnuke as a project.
The project now needs to be built. To do this right click on the dotnetnuke set and select build.
After building the dotnetnuke project we have the Solution to build. To do this right click on the solution at the top of the list in the above image and select build. You are now ready to make changes to your dotnetnuke project, or indeed to create your own modules.
To change the directory where the project will be built right click on the Dotnetnuke project and select properties. From the configurationsdrop down list select All Configurations. Click on the Configurations Properties folder and the Build item. Set dnnbin\ as the output path. Repeat this for each of the projects, but set the output directory to bin\ rather than ..\..\..\bin. This ensures that the built code for each project is kept local to that project and that any code built against the dotnetnuke project doesn't over-write the original code.
To help you understand the structure of Dotnetnuke and how to create your own modules the following projects are included: Provider.AccessDataProvider, Provider.SqlDataProvider, Provider.DNNScheduler, Provider.XMLLoggingProvider, CompanyName.Survey, CompanyName.Survey.AccessDataProvider, and CompanyName.Survey.SqlDataProvider.
Once again we need to rebuild the solution. At the bottom of the main window a strip window should provide details of the build. The final message in here should say something like Build: 8 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped. As a check that the setup is OK the built code will be in the bin folder under each of the projects, except the Dotnetnuke project which will be under the dnnbin folder. Check that no changes have occured to the files in the C:\InetPub\DotNetNuke\bin directory.