I was recently working with a client to deploy an EPiServer site and we came across a rather strange problem. The EPiServer Manager installed fine, but when I tried to set up a web site (with a database or not it doesn't matter) we were getting the following error reported: System.InvalidOperationException: The installation failed, and the rollback has been performed. ---> System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070003)    at System.DirectoryServices.Interop.UnsafeNativeMethods.IAds.PutEx(Int32 lnControlCode, String bst... [More]

I've been thinking a bit about why EPiServer hits the 'sweet spot' for companies so nicely, and I think maybe the answer lies in its balance of feature coverage and market position. It knows where its strong point is - Content Management - but doesn't ignore the other areas. It also aims at the mid-market but is capable of scaling up or down, which is a sadly neglected approach. So many companies are being forced to choose between an self-declared 'Enterprise' solution or a self-confessed 'Entry Level' solution. Problem is, the Enterprise solutions are over-specified and over-priced for their ... [More]

I am currently working on a project where it was necessary to conditionally inject some content into certain properties on some pages. Dynamic Content didn't really help me because what I wanted to do was replace entire properties with content from a property on another page and do it in a nice way for the editor. Linking the page with a shortcut to another page didn't help me because it needed to be only a partial replace and also conditional. Here's an example - and I know there are better ways to do this but I want an example that won't compromise the Intellectual Property of what I am act... [More]

I needed to throw together a quick geolocalisation demo for EPiServer v5 R2 the other day and to do that it was necessary to override some of the default URL rewriting behaviour of EPiServer. I knew it could be done, but I'd never actually had to write a custom URL provider before, so Ted Nyberg's blog post on rewriting in EPiServer gave me a good kick-start. My geolocalisation changes worked a treat (maybe I'll blog about that another time) but I did come across one really nasty 'feature' in EPiServer. I did find a workaround though, so I'll share it with you. Some background first though. ... [More]

EPiServer Norway are associated with an EPiServer community project called EPiCode which had its annual awards on the 12th of November as part of the Christmas Tech Forum. I was really pleased to see the Module of the Year award went to my pals over at NetworkedPlanet for their EasySearch module. Unlike some of the other modules on EPiCode, it isn't free to use commercially - but it is free to download and try out and fills a nice gap in the EPiServer search space. A bunch of other 'active contributors' were lucky enough to get an iPod Shuffle in the awards - including me for contributing Clo... [More]

Introduction Interakting use both Open Source and proprietary products to deliver solutions for many companies. We always try to select the best tool for the job, and when it comes to Content Management it is no different. We have a range of tools we consider using including various Open Source tools (e.g. Nuxeo, DotNetNuke) and also our proprietary offerings (EPiServer, ADXSTUDIO). In the context of many projects it would certainly be possible to deliver a ‘successful’ project in either a proprietary or an Open Source solution. However, when we consider budgetary, functionality, deadline, su... [More]

Last night I was at a BCS Young Professionals Group meeting at the BCS offices in Southampton Street, London. The meeting was part of a 'SkillCentre' series being run with the help of a consultant called Anthony Rees facilitating, and the subject last night was 'Negotiation Skills'. The session itself was excellent, culminating in groups coming up with a simple mnemonic to remember some basic concepts for negotiating. The group I was in came up with the mnemonic 'winwin': What do you want Investigate feasibility Note it down Walk in their shoes Identify tactics Negotiate! Another group... [More]

My XP laptop had ground to a halt - 6 months without a rebuild and it had got so clogged that it literally took 5 minutes just to boot. I needed to wipe it and start again but the head of our technical team offered me a fresh laptop with a clean Vista Business build. Deciding that being a guinea pig was a nice idea, I accepted it. The 4 gig of ram (up from 2 gig) was the sweetener that made up my mind for sure :) As I was setting it up just how I wanted it, one of the things I needed to do was sync my two mobile phones with it. I have both an HTC 4350 (Herald) from work and my own personal HT... [More]

Chrome threw the following error when posting to a forum: (my login name and domain is deliberately blanked) This warning 'Exploit-ObscuredHtml' isn't thrown when doing exactly the same in Internet Explorer, so I'd be interested to know why it's throwing the virus alert. Possibly because it's running the javascript in a separate process to the HTML? Unlikely. More inclined to think it's because it's in the unsecure 'Documents and Settings' folder whereas IE uses the rather more locked-down Temporary Internet Files folder. Either way, I can imagine lots of sites would use Javascript that ... [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]

On our blogs, we recently found we were getting this error when trying to edit some posts: The id's given were occasionally different but it was always the same format... "Could not find category id XX in the Checkbox list which has XX items." Somehow it seems that SubText has got itself in a twist and allocated invalid category id's to the posts. I suspect that this is actually caused by a funny bug between SubText and Microsoft Live Writer. You see, when you write an article in Live Writer you can allocate the categories for it and post it up to SubText. So far, so good. However, the b... [More]

I was at a client's office yesterday for the final review meeting of a two-week Use Case exercise. The particular area of the operations that we were pulling out into Use Cases had been the subject of various patchy projects within the organisation over a couple of years. As far as I can tell some of that work had been really good and laid the groundwork for the Use Cases, but it was not organised into any kind of overall picture or process and there was a certain lack of confidence in the previous projects. The concept of the Use Case approach was really quite radical for them, and the timeli... [More]

I've been back on the Use Cases recently after a bit of a time away from them doing some fairly deep techie stuff. Every time I work with Use Cases I find myself wondering why people aren't using them more (or similar methods) because they are just such a logical way of doing things. Let's face it - who really wants to bounce around a 100 page requirements document between inboxes ad infinitum with no-one really understanding or owning it? And what IT department wants to get a document like that landing on their desks? One of the real beauties of Use Cases is how they feed into the Project Pl... [More]

I've been hanging out on the #epicode IRC channel for the past few months, and over time I've played with several IRC clients such as XChat, Mibbit (for the Web) and HydraIRC. One of the things that you do most often on IRC is /msg people. The server that I use for #epicode is FreeNode. This server requires you to register you nick before doing a /msg. If you try to /msg without registering, you get an error message back from the server. XChat, annoyingly, didn't show me the IRC error and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what was wrong. Mibbit behaves nicely, but you have to enter ... [More]

At the EPiServer Partner Summit I was chatting over dinner to Andy Brodie of Networked Planet. He was remarking that it would be nice within EPiServer to have the capability to show site thumbnails when you hovered over hyperlinks. This intrigued me so when I got back to the UK I did some investigation. There are sites on the internet that do provide a service for this, such as websnapr, but ideally I wanted something that I had full control over. Time to start coding :) After some investigation on the web I found a great article about the WebBrowser control and ASP.NET. I tailored it to my ... [More]

Google have released a lovely little API for their Google Translate service. It uses a RESTful interface and returns a JSON object in the HTTP Response. The usual way to use this would be AJAX-style in client side JavaScript. This might not always be what you want to do though. For example, if you have a server resource in English and you want to show it in the page as Spanish you wouldn't want to render it in English and then have some page load event client side to translate it. You really want to do it server side and render it on the page as Spanish straight away. Of course, Google know t... [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 :)  

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]

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.