Overview Microsoft have released significant parts of the .NET framework source code for developers using Visual Studio 2008.  In case you've not been following the releases, this blog post includes links to configuration and hotfix resources. Hotfix Before you attempt to configure the source code, make sure you have the following patch installed: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10443&wa=wsignin1.0 Configuration I'll not attempt to reproduce perfectly good instructions, so here's a link: Shawn Burke's Blog: Configur... [More]

Well now this is an odd little problem.  I was working on a BizTalk Server project recently and needed to promote some properties to the messaging engine.  The normal scenario is to do the following: Right-click in the schema and select 'Promote > Show Promotions...' Click the 'Property Fields' tab Click the little folder to open our property schema that we have already built. Select the property schema in the dialogue and click OK. Assign our fields Now, I ran in to a problem here and I have yet to find the cause or a fix.  Basically, I don't get the dial... [More]

As part of the launch of Interakting, the pan-european web agency brand of Business & Decision, the E-Business blogs have been reskinned. The blog engine we use is built on SubText, a great little .NET blog engine. Not the easiest to skin, but manageable. Have a browse around. It's the same guys blogging the same great stuff - just a little less blue/grey and a bit more pink :)  

Overview By default, WCF limits the amount of data that can be transferred through an operation invokation in subtle ways.  To override these default limits, you will need to alter both the client and service configuration.  No changes to your code are needed, though. Overview The WCF system has internal limits on the size of various structures.  These include service buffers and XML buffers.  Both of these can be configured in an application's configuration files. Service limits A service provider or client can set limits using an endpoint binding configuration.  The endpoint binding con... [More]

Overview I've recently begun playing around with developing an SOA solution using WCF. My focus is on implementing a service that is loosely coupled, autonomous, highly configurable and reusable.  I might tell you more about it in a later blog, but for now I want to describe some of the design issues involved. Architecting SOA solutions This post is not a replacement for a good book on SOA, and I highly recommend Thomas Erl's various books on the subject.  You can find out more at http://www.soabooks.com.  I've also had the misfortune to read some bad books on the subject, so be careful whe... [More]

Using flash movies in a website is a great way to enhance a user’s experience, deliver content and interact with the user. However there have always been concerns regarding the ability to implement flash whilst remaining SEO friendly and W3C compliant. Below are some of the practices I’ve implemented to overcome these concerns. Make flash file content indexeable A feature added to Flash 8 was to allow meta data to be embedded in swf files making them easily indexeable. You can add a title and description to the flash file by selecting Modify > Document. This text can be read by most... [More]

Recently I was working on a .NET 1.1 Windows form project and wanted to make use the common icons buttons seen in many windows applications.  e.g  New icon, Save, Copy , Paste   Unfortunately the feature to ‘insert standard items’ was only introduced in VS2005 upwards and I needed to use VS2003 for .NET 1.1. Fortunately there’s a very simple solution to this. Open up VS2005, create a windows form project, Insert a tool strip and select ‘insert standard items’ from the tool strip task menu. Switch to the code behind view. In the constructor acces... [More]

Overview Recently, I began having problems with Virtual Server 2005 R2 on my Windows XP computer.  I was not aware of anything having changed, except suddenly my VPCs couldn't find a network adapter.  Facing the possibility of a complete laptop rebuild, I was scouring the net for a solution... Failed attempts Before finally landing a working solution, I attempted the following: Restarting Virtual Machines (before and after other changes) Restarting Virtual Server (and associated services) Looking for patches (none applicable) Creating new network configurations ... [More]

Overview I've been playing around a bit with the idea of integrating Windows Workflow Foundation into custom web server controls.  I've had some success but also hit something of a wall.  If you have any experience with any of these issues, I'd love to hear from you. Context I've started with the following hypothesis: In my experience, developers often make mistakes developing custom controls therefore it is beneficial for controls to be modelled rather than 'coded' and Windows Workflow Foundation is a perfect tool for the job. In practice Using a workflow to take the place of aspects of... [More]

I've been setting up Team Foundation Server 2008, so we can try out the benefits of the source control, management and testing facilities. I do have some quick tips as it has taken some digging around to find a smooth installation process. Starting with a blank Windows 2003 Server machine: Pre-requisites Install .Net Framework 2.0. Install IIS without FrontPage Extensions 2002. (If you are configuring e-mails from this machine) Install SMTP service. Install everything on SQL 2005 , as you'll find it won't install without them. Install SQL 2005 SP2. Pre-requisite ... [More]

I needed to generate some content to fill a page, so I could test out some CSS stylings. I found a site that generates it for you, and generates specific amounts - paragraphs, words, bytes and lists and it will create the content for you. Check it out here: http://www.lipsum.com/ It also contains a little history for anyone who's interested.

The company I work for, Business & Decision, is launching a new brand for their global digital agency function; "Interakting". Apparently "Business & Decision" works better as a brand in their other areas (Business Intelligence, Customer Intelligence and Management Consulting) than it does in E-Business. No shock there then :) It's not officially launched in the UK yet, but you can get a sneak peek of our branding at our shiny new Interakting UK website. The site was built in our Interakting office here in Oxford, and is running on EPiServer 5. Any feedback let me know and I'll get t... [More]

Overview I'm making a concerted effort to give myself a more understanding of ASP.Net.  One of the things I recall from classic ASP and my early forays in to ASP.Net was creating authentication for site.  Generally we created a standard set of functions that we could reuse, but the generally always ended up being 'tweaked' from project to project.  Along with ASP.Net 2.0 Microsoft delivered provider models.  These models can be used for site membership and roles and so looking at the membership role immediately came to mind as being something interesting to look at. Implementation I'm just ... [More]

My flight is booked and I'm looking forward to the summit! The agenda looks packed and I'm especially interested to see what is put on the developer second day 'stream'. At the moment it's just TBA... although there's plenty of other tasty tidbits on the other days too (like the MOSS/EPiServer slot with Mats Hellström). I'm flying out on the early doors SAS flight from Heathrow on the 29th. If there's any other UK partners out there on the same flight, give me a shout and maybe we can link up on our way.

Whilst building the CloudCuckoo module, I used a neat trick to register my custom VPP on-the-fly by using an attribute flag to mark it as an EPiServer plugin. This would cause EPiServer to find it and intialise it when I first hit the EPiServer site. This worked fine on my machine and some others, but I was finding that on one specific machine it wasn't firing properly. EPiServer was calling it to initialise it, but the problem was when I tried to access the HttpContext. In a nutshell, for some reason when this machine fired up the plugin to initialise it, it was losing or not passing in the H... [More]

I've recompiled the CloudCuckoo binary against EPiServer v5 SP1 to save you having to recompile the project yourself. (it was originally built against vanilla v5) Enjoy! Get CloudCuckoo here

Overview I've recently hit an issue where some custom controls have been generating exceptions when unpublished pages exist in an EPiServer site.  In these cases, the relevant (required) properties have null values. Context Rather than using the standard EPiServer property controls, these pages use ASP.NET data-binding and custom controls that access the required properties of EPiServer PageData objects.  They are being viewed in the editing interface by a logged-in user with full permissions.  The PageData object is sourced using a FindPagesWithCriteria operation. Problem Any of the cust... [More]