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]

Having had a glimpse on the BBC this morning, it looks like Microsoft are intending to shift Windows 7 without IE installed in Europe, it is now something users will have to go and download and install for themselves.  In general, it looks like they’re leaving it up to the hardware vendors to decide what is installed on the machine and what is not, but what happens when user pop out and buy a copy of Windows 7 themselves?  I assume that means that there will just be a link on the desktop to go and download the file, otherwise, I can’t quite see how your average user is going to get on the in... [More]

I was recently working on an EPiServer solution and the client wanted to include an RSS feed on certain pages of their site.  I though I would write out here how I consumed the feed.  You’ll want to add error handling etc in here, as this is as rough as a tramps beard whilst being enough for you to get the point. The first thing I had to do was to find out how RSS is structured.  After a little Google search I found an article explaining the structure of RSS in sufficient detail for me to continue. The first thing that I did was create a struck to contain the configuration that I wanted, fai... [More]