If one were to begin learning how to develop modules, what's the best direction to go that offers the most flexibility and advancement for scalability? Would it be Visual Studio? The different versions? Which one is needed so that no road blocks end up in the way.. can all the modules found on Snowcovered be developed with the Express version?

Does anyone have familiarity with Open Web Studio? Does this even come close to Visual Studio's capabilities? I'm assuming it wouldn't, but would love clarification.

Thank you in advance.. I greatly appreciate it.

- Patrick

Yes, the best approach to developing DotNetNuke modules is Visual Studio. That is because Visual Studio is the best tool for developing ASP.NET software. I believe that VS 2008 is the minimum version if you want to develop for DotNetNuke 5 and 6. VS 2010 has more features, and is the recommended version.

The most useful versions of Visual Studio are those that can produce compiled assemblies. Earlier Express versions of VS could not do that, but I believe that 2008 and 2010 can.

Open Web Studio is a somewhat different animal. It is software that is written to create DotNetNuke modules. You can look at our series of tutorials on OWS here. There are also RAD and XMOD Pro that are similar products. None of these have all of the capabilities of VS. But, if you are strictly interested in building DotNetNuke modules, these may be sufficient. I know that R2i, the company that created OWS, uses it. I know of one other company that uses OWS for DotNetNuke module development, claiming that they get better productivity than coding in c# using Visual Studio.