Making progress. I now have DasBlog running as an app but in the same app space as DNN 3. I put it into ~/DesktopModules/DasBlog.

Most of the work today was in getting the VS.Net solution setup so file and assembly references work correctly. The result is a VS.Net solution called DasBlogDNN. I can build it and all the assemblies get correctly deposited into the DNN bin folder.

I am particularly excited by the shared app working correctly. As you may already know, it is a pain to get another ASP.net app to work in a DNN sub-folder. That's because of the HttpModules referenced in the DNN web.config. Because of how ASP.Net manages child apps, in order to get an ASP.Net app to work as a DNN child app, you have to do two things:

1) add a <clear /> element in the <httpModules> section

2) add all the DNN HttpModule assemblies (and referenced assemblies) into the bin folder of the child app.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but that's what has to be done to make it work. Basically, when ASP.Net starts initializing a child app, it first attempts to load all HttpModules declared in a parent app. This is why you need the assemblies in the child app bin folder. Once it encounters <clear /> those assemblies become irrelevant.

Anyway, because of all this craziness, to setup DasBlog as a child app, I would have had to copy all the DNN HttpModules into the DasBlog bin folder. Ugly any way you look at it.

After examining both web.configs (DNN and DasBlog), I managed to get all the relevant DasBlog items ported over to the DNN web.config. Then I had to change a boat-load of relative paths (in script and code-behind) to account for the new app root. Now I have DasBlog running inside the DNN folder.

Next step: integrated authentication.