WPF is revolutionary as it re-invents the Windows design and programming for the Microsoft platform. But why bother? I could write an article for hours and hours on the changes brought about with WPF. Here, I will give a very brief overview of the more visual changes brought about. History If you have had any experience programming Windows in .NET, VB6 or C++ MFC, you'll have heard of GDI. GDI (more recently GDI+) is an API which you use to render text images and other custom drawing functions (like lines, circles, rectangles etc). The GDI library has been around since Windows 95 and was a ... [More]

Following on from Steve's excellent post on how to copy one or more properties from one Page Type to another, I decided to share how easy it is to turn his hard work into an EPiServer plug-in so that it will appear in the admin area of the CMS. First you need to 'decorate' (that's an official term honestly!) your page with the following GuiPlugin attribute: [GuiPlugIn(DisplayName = "Property Duplicator", Description = "Duplicate Page Type Properties", Area = PlugInArea.AdminMenu, Url = "~/cms/Admin/DuplicatePageTypeProperties.aspx")] If you're not sure what that ac... [More]

Searching the contents PDF files is a common requirement that seems to cause some confusion regarding how best to implement it. A simple and flexible solution is using an Adobe PDF IFilter. IFilters are a Microsoft specification that scans a document for its text and properties, allowing Microsoft’s Indexing Service to extract portions of data. Step 1 – Install the IFilter downloaded from Adobe. Accept all default steps. Step 2 – Configure the Indexing service. Basic steps include: Open up computer management > Services and Application > Indexing Service Create a... [More]

I've just installed EPiServer Mail into an EPiServer CMS 5 SP2 site that is running under .NET 3.5 (yes i know its not officially supported but hey). Much to my annoyance I had 3 errors to fix - which simply meant removing 3 lines from the web.config that either the EPiServer Mail install (or the hotfix) added. The offending lines which must be removed are as follows: <add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, ... [More]

I've just spent too long trying to upgrade EPiServer CMS 5 to SP2 but kept getting the following error: Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection. Turns out the problem was that EPiServerManager was pulling the connection string out of my web.config, but it appears it was ignoring the fact it specified an Integrated/Windows connection and was passing an empty SQL username to the database - hence the empty quote marks above. (cheers for your help Steve!) Solution: Temporarily change the SQL connection string in the site's web.config to... [More]

I was listening to coverage of the Beijing Olympics on BBC Radio 5 Live this morning and it was interesting to hear what a spectator had to say about the lack of information that the Beijing organisers provide for spectators. One spectator was at the boxing and apparently there was no information about other events happening or results and, even more impressively, not even a schedule for the boxing either! I would have expected flat screens everywhere with the schedule or, at the least, a printed list. Surely this is an opportunity for London 2012. With the vast amount of Content Management e... [More]

I recently needed to get the NT user name from VBA code. Not a problem, Microsoft have an advisory note that tells you how to do that and there's a good summary of it on this post: http://blogs.officezealot.com/charles/archive/2004/12/10/3574.aspx However, there is a ptentially serious security problem with the other method that Charles suggests on that post - using the environment variable like this: Environ("USERNAME") If you are using the username check in VBA for security purposes (for example, matching a username against a list of known users permitted or restricted on some actions) t... [More]