When using Outlook 2010 RC1, I "suddenly" found that when clicking on hyperlinks, I was prompted by the dialog: This operation has been canceled due to restriction in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator. Now I have local administrator rights, so I wondered what had happened. Its turns out the culprit was Google Chrome. After recently uninstalling it, I found that had not cleaned my registry properly. The value you are looking for (depending on your SID) is located under: Before: Key: HKEY_USERS\<LONG-SID>-2147\Software\Classes\.html Value:... [More]

The /admin switch confused me recently, because I thought it was the same features as a normal login. As usual, I was wrong :-) /admin is a reduced set of features that allow you to, in effect, kick people off of the server. Only the full login's (without /admin) have access to features like copy and paste and shared remote drives.

I was writing my own custom configuration class to reduce the amount of <appSettings> in my code, but also to make sure the values were type safe. I wrote a simple test application to try this out. 1: class MyConfigurationTestConfiguration : System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection 2: { 3: private static MyConfigurationTestConfiguration settings = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("MyConfigurationSettingsConfiguration") as MyConfigurationTestConfiguration; 4:  5: public static MyConfigurationTestConfigurat... [More]

Nothing to complex this time, just for reference really. Sometimes you want a simple button to just go back to the previous page. All you need is: <asp:Button runat="server" Text="<%$Resources:MyResources,Back%>" OnClientClick="javascript:history.back(); return false;"/> The reason I'm using an ASP.NET Button is purely for the Localization functionality, so you can use with with HTML controls as well

We tend to use a virtual machine per external client so that we can keep things nicely separated. We can then easily add people to a project by giving them a copy of the virtual hard disk and they can be up and running in minutes (once they’ve renamed the guest machine name to avoid IP conflicts!) That worked fine until we started using TFS, where it would moan that the workspace doesn’t exist because its now a different user accessing TFS. After some digging i found the answer was to edit the following file: C:\Documents and Settings\[USER NAME]\Local Settings\Application Data\M... [More]

When trying to connect to TFS 2008 on VS 2008, I had this error: The path xxx is already mapped in workspace xxx It turns out that when using my VPC, it was cloned incorrectly. Someone else had created a workspace using their credentials, cloned the VPC for my use and then when I logged on using the same account name, I got this error message. The way to allow you to continue is to close VS 2008 and then rename the settings file with a .bak extension located at: C:\Documents And Settings\<current user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0\Cache\VersionControl.... [More]

Recently, I’ve had to interpret some user input and then place this input into an XML file for processing by BizTalk Server 2006. Unfortunately, BizTalk Server 2006 likes you to encode characters using their XML equivalents. Let me explain.. Background This can seem quite easy using the System.Xml.XmlSerializer, with its ability to automatically generate XML and escape invalid characters for us. There are problems though. Here is a template class: public class TestClass {     public string Element1 { get; set; }     public string Element2 { get; set; }     public string Element3 { get;... [More]

We’ve recently been looking at importing Microsoft Project tasks into TFS so that the developers can see their tasks inside visual studio. However the first snag was that TFS work items aren’t able to support more than one resource being assigned to them, a problem when your Project Manager has allocated more than one developer to do the same thing! Also some of the tasks in the project plan are assigned to the client, E.g. ‘Sign Off Wireframes’ and by default TFS will only allow you to assign work items to valid users than exist in your companies Active Directory. I got round the multiple r... [More]

FindControl() is great if you’re looking for a control one level down, but if you’re making a dynamic control with n levels of child controls it can become a pain… Extension Methods to the rescue! Not only does it find the control your looking for at any level in the page, it also used generics to return the control without needing to cast it. /// <summary>/// Finds the control (Recursively) with an ID matching that given, of the Type requested. /// No need to cast either!/// </summary>/// <typeparam name="T">The type of control to return</typeparam>///... [More]

I’ve been looking in to MVC a fair bit recently (more specifically Microsoft’s implementation) and came across this article about Dependency Injection by Mike Brind.  Well worth a read as it explains the concept very well if you’re not familiar with it.

I wanted to have a little play with XForms last night and have to say I was a little surprised.  Not necessarily with the complexity of displaying a form on a page, but with the lack of documentation about how to do it.  Now that I've figure out a method of displaying an XForm, I though I would share it in the home the less people suffer the problem in the future. First off, EPiServer has a page about developing with XForms which is worth a read, but it is by no means an exhaustive list of how to actually use an XForm. To get a form on your page, do the following (well, this is what I did an... [More]

I’m working on a new project at the moment and am aware that we’re probably going to have a fair few translations to do.  Our general approach at Interakting with regards to labels (i.e. static bits of text that are not content managed) is as follows: Create an Excel spreadsheet once we know what all of the labels in our final site are going to be with a tab for each control and page type.  This is a manual process carried out by some poor person reading the XML files in the project. Supply that spreadsheet to the customer/translation agency.  The afore mentioned ‘poor perso... [More]

A colleague of mine had some problems after recently upgrading an EPiServer site developed in Visual Studio 2005. The site he was developing was brought up to date by using Visual Studio 2008. After changing the web project build framework to .NET 3.5, the development machine compiled the site no problem. However the problem was that the STAGE Web.config file had not been updated with some extra entries that the upgrade wizard had put in. The error he was getting was highlighting the “this PageData data”, saying “Type expected”. public static class EPiServerExtensions { public stat... [More]

Last night, I was building a little thing in jQuery to slide a menu off to the left of the screen.  What I wanted to do was queue the following effects so that the rest of the content on the page could take up it’s space once it has gone: Adjust the ‘left’ position of the menu <div> to slide it off the screen. Hide the menu <div> so that the content can move in. The second step seems to be necessary as adjusting the left position of the <div> alone does not allow the content to move in (I‘m working on that bit still). So lets take a second to look at what I ... [More]

Its about time I stopped being scared of the ‘new’ things on the internet that are not written in C# and started to embrace them.  As my previous post alludes to that fact that I am starting to take a closer look at front-end web design (or at least how to implement it!). One thing I’m really keen to do is start having a play with jQuery, as this also ties in quite nicely with a project I am writing the functional specification for this week. Sliding Vertical Menu The first thing that I wanted to do was to have vertical navigation element that the user could hide, giving them more room to v... [More]

I’ve been involved in some web design builds recently, which has been somewhat of a learning experience for me.  Last time I was really involved in knocking up the front-end of a site everything was done in tables an that was just that way it was (a fair few years ago!). I started my journey by reading and/or flicking through a couple of books: Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholme.  I read this one cover to cover, it’s well written and covers all of the basics if you’re just getting started or are incredibly rusty (like me!). CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.... [More]

I’m sure that, like a lot of people working with EPiServer I have a play area that I use to try things out and start off any proof of concept work that I’m going to be implementing later on in  various projects.  For this, I use the SDK Installation of EPiServer CMS along with an instance of the Visual Studio Web Server when my laptop boots up so that it’s always running. Today, I wanted to have a play with Composer with a view to knowing enough about it to be able to get sign-off some projects that can use it.  First thing is just install it and see what happens.  There were some pretty good... [More]

Now that I get to use EPiServer CMS v5, I’m having approximately 165.3% more fun that I was with version 4.6.  I can actually find information about 5 easily on the internet, brilliant!  What I do find dismally disappointing though is the state of the SDK.  A great deal of it just lists methods or properties with no description.  In honesty, I can find out more using reflector.net. While I appreciate that the guys at EPiServer are doing some great work delivering a brilliant set of tools for us to work with, I can’t help but think that someone should be updating the SDK with a little more vig... [More]

I’ve been working on a couple of things lately in EPiServer that I want to be able to easily re-use on other projects.  From my point of view that means just dropping DLLs in folders and letting EPiServer do as much of the work as possible.  One of my little pieces  of functionality needs to happen when a page has been published.  There are a couple of ways to do this, and previously I have been doing it in globla.ascx.  Today I cam across an blog by Allen Thraen on discussing the subject of how to register DataFactory event handlers in EPiServer which describes in much better detail than I ca... [More]

Bah, I just found a much quicker and much simpler way of reading RSS while reading Mats Hellström’s blog article about Aggregating Feeds on the EPiServer Blogs. Mats is talking about taking multiple feeds and adding them together, I’m still really only interested in on.  The key point I took from his blog is the SyndicationFeed class and all of its pals from the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace.  This makes most (read that as all) of my previous post on the subject pretty much irrelevant, as this is all nicely handled for us. The code blow shows how I might do somethign similar to t... [More]