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]

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]

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]

I often get asked to provide a handy starting guide to new people joining the company/team.  It's pretty straight forward to find on the EPiServer World site if you look under the Get Started tab. Just follow the link to Start Developing with EPiServer CMS 5 R2 for some articles explaining the basics and video presentations too. I would also recommend having a look at Relate+, which is a great addition to EPiServer CMS for building community-themed web sites.  Again, there is some useful documentation about this in the Get Started tab under Start Developing with Relate+. Enjoy!

I'm still fairly new to EPiServer, so I'm going through the process of a great many rookie errors whilst taking over a site from someone with vastly more knowledge of the product than me. One issue I had recently was when I was creating a new stage server for a client so that they could test things out.  I went through a cobbled route of copying their live DB and live code and slapping them on to of a clean EPiServer install and hacking about in the web.config file to get it all working.  The in itself was a piece of cake. I started getting problems when the AD users could not connect tot he... [More]

When you are first playing with table adapters you might get to see.  When you create your typed data set, Visual Studio will create an element in the generated XSD that contains the connection string that you were using.  This will more than likely not be the connection string that you want to use in your production environment.  So how do you go about changing it?  Well, if you start using the intellisense in Visual Studio, you will soon find that there is a 'Connection' property on the table adapter once you have created it.  Great!  Lets set the connection string on that and well be done... [More]

This was not the first time I've seen this error message in a web application.  Usually it happens on the development box and a quick re-compile gets rid of it quite easily. I had it today an a staging box, so re-compile is not an option.  Looking at the fairly obviously generated file name, it's clear that this file is part of the ASP.Net compilation process, so that was the general area to look for a solution. After a brief read about the Compilation Element in the web.config file on the MSDN library, I made a brief edit to my web.config so that the batch attribute is set to FALSE.  This m... [More]

I've seen several posts today after an ex-colleague mentioned on their blog it not being easy to get the Management Studio for SQL 2008 Express once you've installed the engine only option of SQL Express. There is a method of upgrade that Dan details to change the SQL 2008 Express version, but you can also download the Management Studio from Microsoft directly without upgrading your instance.  You will need Windows Installer Version 4.5 though :) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=08e52ac2-1d62-45f6-9a4a-4b76a8564a2b&displaylang=en

Many year ago I built an e-commerce solution where I was receiving the international currency code (I.e. GBP or USD) and had to use this to determine the currency symbol to display.  This was during the dirty days of ASP.Classic so I just slapped in a 'nice' little switch statement and that was that. That is neither elegant or good, and now faced with a similar issue I decided to look in to the problem and get a nicer solution. The Problem I'm receiving ISO 4217 currency codes in my application and that application in itself is running under a current culture of en-US.  Using this code, I... [More]

I was asked today how to go about downloading a file as a response to a server request.  I think last time I had to do that was in that days of ASP.Classic. Anyhow, incase you are interested, the following code will allow you to download content through the browser and should bring up the browser save dialogue. // Load a lovely file (yep - I'm not too concerned about permissions here) and // read it into a buffer FileStream fs = new FileStream(@"C:\TestXMLFile.xml", FileMode.Open); long fileSize = fs.Length; byte[] fileBuffer = new byte[Convert.ToInt32(fileSize)]; fs.Read(fileBuffer, ... [More]

Having recently been subject to a number of rounding issues in an application, we've had to take a closer look at how rounding works in the .Net framework. It seams that when using Math.Round(), there is an overload that allows us to specify the type of rounding that is used in the form of the MidpointRounding enumeration.   As the Microsoft documentation will tell you, there are two possible values we can choose from: ToEven: Round to the nearest even number. AwayFromZero: Round to the nearest number away from zero. This proves to be quite interesting when you start thinking abo... [More]