Creating back-end integrations is inevitably linked with having to authenticate against a remote endpoint. Be that a Rest API, FTP or an APM - secrets (credentials, api tokent, shared secrets) of some sort will be involved in the process.
Those credentials must be stored somewhere. At this point I hope no one even considers hardcoding those but even if you extract them to configuration - having them exposed in your repository may be a bad idea and is frowned upon by tools like SonarQube.
I’ve received this nice comment on one of my earlier posts and I thought it might warrant a blog post since it is a nice little challenge and might be useful for more scripters in our community.
Hi Adam,
thanks for the pointers on PowerShell! There’s one in particular I’m hoping to get some help with, if that’s ok? I have created a Branch Template in Sitecore, and I want to deploy it under every item in the Content Tree that uses one particular page template (about 200 instances of deployment, in this case). For an added bit of fun, there will be several different language versions being deployed along the way, so I guess that prevents me doing a blanket rollout. Could you please recommend a script that is along the lines of “Add this Branch Template under this Item ID in the following named language codes”? I realise I would then be repeating that line 200 times with varying parent item ID and languages, but I can live with that if that’s the easiest way to do it.
Many thanks for your help!
Phil Neale
The post is related to the image resize vulnerability fix introduced in Sitecore 7.5. To read more about the Sitecore fix go to theRelease notes pageand search for ?Media request protection?. While I was holding off for a number of months on the publication of the post as it puts the attack vector in plainer sight that I would like it to be (while the community figured out how to work with Media Resizing in a neat way) - but recently I’ve seen voices raised considering turning the Media Request protection off which I hope you will not be doing after reading this post. The post will also tell you how to enable such security on your older versions of Sitecore.
So here’s the story…. At some point in Cognifide we have performed a research around Sitecore security and one of my colleagues (Marek) found out that you could easily kill any Sitecore instance by performing an image resize attack on it. While the CMS did some rudimentary checks and limited the values of height and width you could still perform an attack by harvesting the images from the site and perform multiple parallel & iterative size increase or just plain use the scale parameter to achieve any image size. A result of such attack would be a a denial of service due to 100% CPU & memory usage and would potentially allow for filling the server drive by creating the endless number of scaling calls.
Marek was even kind enough to provide a proof of concept code that confirmed the hypothesis by performing attack on a few of our internal servers. The program would load the home page; parse to find images linked from it and perform resizing of the images in a number threads.
In one of my previous posts I described how to create reports in Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE for short) that allow you to leverage the joint power of Sitecore and PowerShell to deliver complete and elegant reports in little to no time. In this post I’ll tell you how to take this a step further and operationalize them into full blown Sitecore Desktop applications.
The secret sauce is in the actions you can place on the report, the additional parameters that I haven’t mentioned in the previous post, and the use of Sitecore rules engine with some rules that come with SPE.
For the purpose of this post I will limit the scripts to samples that are (mostly) in the vanilla SPE deployment.
Let’s begin with describing the actions and how you can configure them to appear in your reports.
This post describes how you can deliver JSON/XML/HTML APIs quickly with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions.
Technically this was also available earlier but the API was not refined to the state it is now.
As Sitecore is constantly progressing from predominantly serving as a CMS towards becoming a mobile and web application delivery platform (which is very apparent by the recent increase of SPEAK popularity, the introduction of Item Web API and the app centric nature of the new Sitecore 8 interface there is an increased need to rapidly deliver APIs for those those front end applications to work seamlessly with the CMS back-end.
PowerShell Extensions can help you with that move by enabling rapid prototyping of APIs that are either JSON or XML in nature.
This is just a short post to supplement the “Working with Sitecore items in PowerShell Extensions” as we now have a new cmdlet of retrieving items in SPE 3.0.
Find-Item cmdlet allows you to leverage the glorious new search API Sitecore introduced in the 7.0 version of its CMS to retrieve items using the Sitecore Content Search indexes.
You will find the available parameters on it as follows:
Recently the Sitecore PowerShell Team has been reflecting on the progress of the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) module. We appreciate all the feedback and contributions from the community. Without the many great people in the community, the module just wouldn’t be where it is today. The team is proud of the accomplishments for a module developed purely by the community with no formal Sitecore support.
The new year has revealed some exciting news out on the Marketplace for SPE.
Since we’ve seen some interest from developers wanting to join the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions team, I thought it might be worth documenting how my development environment is put together to allow for easier on-boarding of new members (Yes, we’re hiring! No, we can’t pay you ;) ). Maybe you just want to compile it yourself to make sure we’re not up to no good, or just plain see inside and play with it…
First of all you need to have Sitecore installed somewhere (obviously). For the purpose of examples I’ll assume your instance is located at *C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Sitecore8* and has the 3 standard folders Data, Databases and Website in them as it normally has. For that very same reason I’ll also assume that your Sitecore PowerShell Extensions project folder is located at *C:\Projects\SitecorePowerShell*
I’m really excited to see the 3.0 version of Sitecore PowerShell Extensions released. There have been more effort, love and sweat poured into this version by the whole team than I would ever expect. This blog has been written to assert the smoothest upgrade experience possible. While we’re always striving for the smoothest upgrade possible - this version introduces some changes that require you to perform a manual step or two. While those could be automated to a degree, making those manual was a conscious choice as I didn’t want to break e.g. your Insite instance that stores some of its files in the “Console” sub-folder of the Website folder.
Before upgrading your instance from Sitecore PowerShell Extensions 2.x to 3.0 please make sure you have your scripts backed up as the upgrade process might cause some of your scripts to be removed. This is especially true if you used the integration script libraries and you are upgrading from SPE 2.7 or earlier. If you’re upgrading from version 2.8 and your script live in your own modules You should be safe although it’s always smart to back up.
The steps you need to take prior or after installing the new version of the PowerShell Extensions:
This has been on my plate for a while and to be honest I’m not sure what took me so long as it literally took around 4 hours from start to completion which I consider a testament to how easy it is to create additional integrations with PowerShell akin to the Gutter integration or the login/logout integration Michael West has recently introduced in the platform.
What this integration allows you to do is to eliminate the need for code deployment when you’re in need for a quick action here and there for when a user executes a workflow command.
You might find this article helpful by a Cognifide colleague of mine. I especially like this image which illustrates nicely where actions fit in a Sitecore workflow.
A large problem with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions up to version 3.0 was the lack of proper separation of solutions provided on top of it from the core of the module. The problem is that all integrations look for scripts in the main Script Library but they look for them solely in their single libraries. The specification outlined in this blog aims at solving this issue.
The current structure of the tree looks somewhat as follows:
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve probably read about the ways of putting scripts in the Content Editor ribbon or Context Menu. Those are some simple and quick ways of extending the Sitecore UI to do quick actions accessible for your users without them having to even know about the existence of PowerShell in your system. Up until now however we’ve not been very vocal about the fact that those does not really have to be quick one-off actions but they can indeed form a broader solution to your problem through the use of persistent, named sessions. In fact Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) allow you to manage sessions and decide that it should stay in memory after the script have executed. In fact SPE does quite a bit of session maintenance itself that you might want to be aware of.
Creating reports is probably a task that every developer dread. I for once always felt like listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ?16 Tons? every time when I was supposed to do it for yet another project audit – especially this part resonated with me:
I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said “Well, a-bless my soul”
Reading some of the blogsfrom the Sitecore community I find it pretty apparent that we didn’t do a great job advocating the optimizations that PowerShell Extensions have introduced for working with Sitecore items. This blog attempts to rectify this problem to a degree.
How do I retrieve my Sitecore items the PowerShell way?
The most natural way to retrieve Sitecore items is with use of Get-Item and Get-ChildItem commandlets. That is because those 2 commandlets add a PowerShell wrapping around them that allows the functionalities that I’m going to describe in the next section of this blog after I’ll tell you all about retrieving items.
If you have retrieved your item directly using the Sitecore API you can still add the nice wrapper when you pipe them through the Wrap-Item commandlet as well. Some of those enhancements work in the older versions of PowerShell Extensions but I would encourage you to upgrade to the latest version (2.7 at the time this blog was written) to leverage the full potential of the environment.
I’ve been meaning to write this article for quite a while since the functionality to remote into the Sitecore environment exists in the module at least for at least a couple of versions now and the recent email from one of the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions users convinced me this cannot wait any longer.
When would I remote into my Sitecore instance?
You would probably need this as part of your Continuous Integration or installation scripts. If you need to manipulate Sitecore data from your deployment script remoting is the right solution for you.
I’ve decided to 1-up the game from my previous post and zip something that isn’t really a real file but rather a blob in a Sitecore database. The script below is based heavily on the last post but instead of just zipping content of a flat folder traverses the Sitecore item tree and zips all files beneath the current folder.
If you have downloaded the 2.1 version of the Sitecore PowerShell Console from the Sitecore Marketplace you will actually have the script deployed on your system already.
Here’s how it looks like for your user in the Content Editor:
There was a breaking change in the Console 2.1, if you’re using version 2.1 or newer use Download-File commandlet instad of the “Get-File” as shown in the code below.
You might have have found yourself hunting around in the Sitecore interface for something that would allow you to download all the the log files in a fast and convenient way once time or another. Have you found one? Me neither? but luckily I had the PowerShell console installed on my server so I started looking for a script to zip all files in a folder and luckily because we have a full PowerShell power in the box I could stand on the shoulders of giants and get the zipping part from Stack Overflow – again (which is the majority of my script. The rest was super easy – just call the function and download the file?
Last night I needed to reproduce really quickly a site structure we will be moving from another CMS and create a matching item hierarchy in my Sitecore instance… I could face an hour or so of boring clicking and copying and pasting and hoping I’ve not missed anything or… I could write a short PowerShell script to do the work for me… Guess which path I chose?
Before you use the script you should customize the script parameters:
Kieranties must be the biggest PowerShell nerd (together with yours truly) I’ve had a privilege to chat with (I guess this implies I talk to myself?). So it shouldn’t be a surprise when the two started talking PowerShell/Sitecore pixie dust started sparkling.
This time – events integration.
What does it take to integrate PowerShell with Sitecore events?
This is a fairly easy task that Sitecore pretty thoroughly describes in the ?Using Events? SDN article. So there is little point for me to reiterate it here.
One thing I always wanted to add to the Cognifide PowerShell Console for Sitecore but never had the chance to investigate properly, was GUI and user interaction. For example in a regular PowerShell console when an irreversible action needs to be taken or one that user needs to be notified about – a question is asked:
Unfortunately due to the stateless and non-persistent nature of HTTP connections this is not easily achievable in Sitecore Sheer environment especially since in our case a PowerShell session usually lives in a separate thread within a Sitecore Job.
Reading some time ago the Item Buckets documentation I discovered something really cool called code data sources. We delivered something similar in our internal libraries and it proved super useful ever since. I’ve also recently read a nice article by Ronald Nieuwenhuis on NewGuid about their approach to the subject.
So what a PowerShell and Sitecore nut does when he sees stuff like that? Obviously delivers a scripted data source!
So I’ve finally found a moment (well a few days actually) to follow up on the previous article, and just about time as there are quite a few more tricks that PowerShell can help you with when assessing the quality of your Sitecore solution.
One thing that you need to keep in mind when reading the recommendations is that they are exactly that – recommendations. While Sitecore strongly encourages you that you follow them – I can see how most of those are perfectly fine to be ditched in some situations, you just need to be careful about picking those situations. By the general rule of thumb though, following vendor recommendations is a good thing and they are usually a good metrics of a well put together solution. Most of statistics provided in this post are hard to gather without a scripting solution like Sitecore PowerShell Console or Revolver.
A while ago Jakob suggested that putting the Sitecore PowerShell Console in Visual Studio might not be a bad idea. He even provided me with the boilerplate code that served as a stub for the module (Thanks a million Jakob!).
So after some struggling on my part the new module is now on the Sitecore Marketplace. There is really not much to write about. If you like PowerShell and Sitecore Rocks you will find it pretty neat. Otherwise I’m afraid those are not the droids you are looking for
Recently I’ve been asked to audit a site for one of our clients. Overall for a fairly seasoned Sitecore developer it’s rather obvious what to look for in a site and get a feel for whether an a solution is thoroughly thought through or just put together using brute-force development. You can usually tell if the implementation is sloppy or excellent, but how do you quantify that feeling to give the objective view to the person reading your report? Looking at the Sitecore Developer Network I’ve found the following set of recommendations. This is a great help with codifying how a proper Sitecore implementation should look like, what should we pay attention to and most importantly it’s a great reference when you’re trying to prove that your feeling is something more than just nitpicking but rather an industry standard that the developers should adhere to. I recommend strongly that you look at it and think how closely your practices match those that Sitecore recommends.
All of the PowerShell blog posts so far were about using the console. Being the developer however, you probably think – well that’s good for admins, but what’s in it for me? How can I benefit from it in my code? Well you can. With the latest update you can run the PowerShell environment in your application and take advantage of its scripting power, by getting the results out of it and pulling them into your app.
There is a lot of new stuff in the imminent 2.0 release of the PowerShell Console for Sitecore. Some of it is fairly obvious like the improved console window, some of it not so much. The aim of the console has always be to enable Sitecore developers to extend the CMS in new exciting ways. For this to happen it had to become a mini-platform on its own. So far you could use it to add scripts to ribbons and menus, write scripted tasks and execute scripts just by launching them from a URL call.
That’s extending Sitecore with PowerShell but what about PowerShell itself?
One of the coolest features introduced in 2.0 is the ability to write your own commandlets. Sure you could always use PowerShell to do it and write commandlets in script. But then the caveat was that you had to attach such commandlets to your own scripts (or put them in the initial script that would have to execute prior to the console). Now I’m talking about writing the real commandlets, just like those that come with the PowerShell console itself. Starting from 2.0 the console does not default to only attach commandlets that come with it, but can also scan other assemblies to attach your commandlets. To add your own all you have to do is well.. write them but then? all you have to do is to use the standard Sitecore include mechanism to enable the console to find them.
While I’m updating it on a separate page I thought for the purpose of having a record and further tracking - it would be interesting to capture the state of the PowerShell knowledge in the Sitecore community here as well.
Most of this post is also based on the Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell Quick Reference however despite the sharing scripting runtimes the nature of the both shells differ considerably as described in the previous post: Sitecore PowerShell Console cheat sheet – Part 1. In all cases where it made sense I’ve converted the samples to establish them in Sitecore scenarios.
How to Write Conditional Statements
To write an If statement use code similar to this:
I’m realizing time and time again that the learning curve for PowerShell can be steep without a proper guidance. While most people I talk to are very excited about the concept they become discouraged after a having some tries and not realizing its full potential. Therefore I decided it’s worth spending some time introducing some basic principles to help scripting alleviate some of the initial pains.
A few days back a budy from our Sitecore team has alerted me to this interesting question on StackOverflow which asks for automation of content promotion from one Sitecore instance to another. He suggested - and rightly so – that the PowerShell Console could be used in that scenario. While this was always possible by simply writing it as a PowerShell code the latest version of the console added a few commandlets making building packages much easier.
So now that you can easily create the menus and ribbons executing PowerShell scripts, it might be a good time to do some more administrative tasks? let’s start with scheduled tasks. I’m not going to go deep into the task scheduling, you can find an excellent post by John West on his blog regarding task scheduling. Currently the PowerShell module supports one of the ways described in the post – the section describing how to configure them is called ?Scheduled Tasks? in the blog.
Sitecore is built from the grounds up with extendibility in mind. Be that plugging into any place in its internal pipelines or any aspect of its User eXperience, therefore when I’ve managed to extend it’s context menu, I expected to have no problems whatsoever doing the same to its ribbon. Mind you I was right?
Using the PowerShell Console Module it took me less than 10 minutes total to add a nice piece of functionality that I thought was missing – Publish items I have modified.
In the he latest update of PowerShell Console for Sitecore, I’ve started experimenting with further integration – context scripts. What is that and what can it do for you?
You can safely assume PowerShell is not something your regular users will aspire to learn, but it does not mean they cannot harness its power if you enable them to.
If you look closely at the latest Microsoft solutions you may notice that a lot of what GUI does is running some scripting behind the scenes. This is true for a long time with the SQL Server Management studio where pretty much for any action you can generate a script that will let you automate a common task.
For the same of brevity I’m assuming your location is already somewhere within a Sitecore tree (e.g. you did something akin to cd master:\content prior to executing the following scripts.
The aim of the PowerShell console for Sitecore is to create a command line interface to your data so you can automate and aggregate mundane tasks as well as create statistics and a discoverability layer on top of your content.
Have you ever found yourself:
having to make a mundane change to a large number of pages?
in need of getting statistics field or template usages?
being curious of e.g. what’s the oldest page on your site?
in need to find out how many authors really create your content and how active they are?
having to copy or move a large number of files from one folder to another?
renaming or deleting files in your file store en-masse?
publish pages that match some specific feature rather than a whole branch?
If the answer to any of those (and more) is something akin to “yes I did!”, I believe you might find my little plugin useful.
The idea is to create a scripting environment to work within Sitecore process, being able to make native calls to Sitecore API and modify content on a per-property level. The goal was to make it familiar to your IT and developers so they can reuse their skillset with it or if they rather learn it here, this knowledge will benefit them in the long run as clearly PowerShell is becoming an industry standard. The plugin’s aim is to manipulate not just sites, but files and pages on a large scale or perform statistical analysis of your content using a familiar and well documented query language. The console allows you to execute and test scripts interactively, but also gives the admin means of exposing scripts to end users within context menus and in the ribbon. I’m sure in the long run I’ll come up with more applications. Scripted pipeline processors? Scripted renderings? Scripting campaigns statistics and engagement workflow steps? You name it…
Now there is Rocks interface that performs similar task which I think is brilliant, however slightly - yet significantly different. Rocks integrates with your Windows PowerShell console and allows you to work on your remote website as if it was a file system on your machine. Rocks also features a number of commandlets that help you with some common tasks. The definite bonus of this approach is that you can simply use it in your deployment script and integrate some common content modifications, or clear caches/recycle bins on your server in a timely manner from your monitoring environment. I think the solution is a really needed addition to your Sitecore toolbox, but… it’s somewhat limited. Namely whatever new idea you want to employ in your script, is either supported by the commandlets provided – or impossible. You have access to all the goodies of rocks, but any extension must first be imagined and implemented in Rocks (both server and client side).
The Sitecore Console however works within the process of your Sitecore site and therefore can instantiate and execute any API Sitecore features. The only limit is that of the imagination. this comes at a price too though. The most important thing is security. The PowerShell plugin by itself does not run with elevated privileges, nor does it circumvent the rights, but since you can use any Sitecore API a malicious person could potentially do it themselves – therefore you need to be careful whom do you grant access to the PowerShell Console.
The console comes with some sample scripts when you install it – review the script and press Ctrl+Enter to execute and see some of the interesting use cases for it.
By default the console creates a “drive” for each of your databases so you will definitely have a “core” and “master” drives, and you will most probably have a “web” drive.
Since this is only an introductory post I’ll let you discover the full list of commands by yourself, just use the following script within the console:
Should you put your Sitecore site behind a load balancing proxy you will run into a bit of a problem with analytics where all the Engagement Analytics app would ever report would be your own load balancing proxy’s IP address. Needless to say that is fairly big loss as you are unable to reap a host of benefits of the Sitecore CEP like page personalization, automation and reporting.
While our website was running on Sitecore 6.4 this problem was already solved and we have implemented something akin to the solution from Jeroen’s blog. Meanwhile Sitecore has reimplemented its analytics engine from the grounds up in version 6.5, and I should say they did a great job on that. However in the process the API for the analytics has changed to a degree that made our current solution obsolete, basically what we got logged looked as follows:
We had a situation in the company this week which required us to deliver the whole EPiServer virtual path provider file structure to the client – zipped. Easy enough? go to the EpiServer VPP directory and? well? ok? hmm? so the path provider is versioning and as a consequence the physical organization of files on the disk does not make any sense for a human trying to browse it.
Fine! So let’s create a native provider and do a copy and paste within the file manager?. hmm an exception complaining about the provider incompatibility?
Naturally, my knee-jerk reaction is – let’s do it with the PowerShell? which I recall was doing something like this in it’s previous version? The example I’ve tested and placed in the ?Samples? tab was:
Most of this post is also based on the Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell Quick Reference however despite the sharing scripting runtimes the nature of the both shells differ considerably as described in the previous post: PowerShell for EPiServer - cheat sheet - Part 1. In all cases where it made sense I’ve converted the samples to establish them in EPiServer scenarios.
How to Write Conditional Statements
To write an If statement use code similar to this:
Most of this is based on the Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell Quick Reference however despite the sharing scripting runtimes the nature of the both shells are pretty different (although the differences are not as vast as one might think).
Windows PowerShell
PowerShell Console for EPiServer
Interactive ? command can ask for confirmations and can be aborted. User can be solicited to provide input.
Batch ? all commands are being executed in one go, the script has no chance to ask questions, go or no-go decisions have to be solved within the script.
Supports colouring.
Supports plain text output only.
Supports command line arguments for running scripts.
All arguments are defined directly within the script or derived from context automatically.
Can access any file depending on the rights of the user.
Can only access files the web application identity can write to. Cannot access files on user?s machine but rather operates on the server?s file system. Cannot operate with elevated privileges.
That said, I considered that enough of the Reference document is irrelevant in the EPiServer scenario that it’s beneficial for the users of the console to have a bespoke cheat sheet created especially for the purpose of this plugin.
Ok, so I’ve got my shot of endorphins writing about PowerShell last week (damn, it’s nice to be able to code again!), and I got pretty determined on making it usable and achieving all the goals I’ve initially envisioned. and in the process build a usable tool and a library of scripts that people can use either directly or to modify to meet their needs.
It’s been a while since I had a chance to do any coding… turns out leading a development division tends to not have much to do with development… who knew?!
But I’ve finally got a moment to sit down and refresh the EPiServer PowerShell console and make it compatible with both CMS versions 5 & 6. You could technically use it before on CMS 6 but the looks of it was broken. (previous version available here)
I meant to write this a long time ago but somehow that never really got out of the room. Following is a narrative of an EPiServer site that was on and off the net for half a year or longer and what I’ve learned in the process.
We’ve gathered all the data from the client – we know they have implemented custom ?skins? (basically controls that brand the mini sites based on under which domain the site is being displayed. Quite a cool solution. Also since they were struggling with the speed they have implemented a custom mini taxonomy based on Lucene.net to speed things up. Yet the site is terribly slow and keeps showing the familiar (for a developer) ?Application is busy under initialization? from time to time.
This one definitely took more time than I initially expected, and before I devote even more to it I would very much like to hear your opinion. Do you find it useful? Which way should the development be going? But first things first?
Have you ever found yourself:
having to make a mundane change to a large number of pages?
in need of getting statistics on page properties or page type usages?
being curious of e.g. what’s the oldest page on your site?
having to copy or move a large number of files from one folder to another or between versioning and non versioning virtual path providers?
renaming or deleting files in your file store en-masse?
If the answer to any of those (and more) is a ?yes!?, I believe you might find my little plugin useful.
One of the many things we debate constantly at Cognifide is how to improve the user experience. How to make editor’s life easier, how to simplify the common everyday tasks, what can be automated, and simply how to make our customer smile a little when they use our projects.
For that to work, apart from the overall big blocks to be in place and working seamlessly (which is the absolute minimum required) – you need to be VERY attentive to details.
One of the most frequently and eagerly used programming constructs of the Microsoft.Net Framework is Enum. There are several interesting features that make it very compelling to use to for all kinds of dropdowns and checklists:
The bounds factor – proper use of Enum type guarantee that the selected value will fall within the constraints of the allowed value set.
The ability to treat Enums as flags (and compound them into flag sets) as well as a one-of selector.
The ease of use and potentially complete separation of the ?Enum value? from the underlying machine type representation that ensures the most efficient memory usage.
Surprisingly enough EPiServer as it stands right now does not have an easy facility to turn Enums into properties. To give credit where credit is due, the EPiServer framework provides a nice surrogate that mimic that behaviour to a degree. The relevant property types are:
Aparently I have written something on that note before for CMS 4 and it looks like someone still needs it as I got a request for an updated version for it a couple of days ago. So here we go:
for the most part the syntax for the call is equivalent to what is was before so go to my previous article regarding that (check out the old article for details). What I’ve added this time around is:
Eric Evans of Domain Driven Design will be giving a talk at PUT just before Eclipse DemoCamp, June 24th @ 18:00. Cognifide are sponsoring the event and it would be a great chance for you guys to dust of those design skills. Domain Driven Design is going to be course that we hope to run out of the Cognifide Office late this year with the a little help from our friends at Skills Matter.
Last week or so ago a couple of friends in another project in Cognifide has run into a wall while trying to load test their website. the problem was as follows: The website is highly AJAX based – the page merely loads a stub in the initial request but then loads the rest of its data in a dynamic matter therefore a traditional web testing tools are fairly useless. What they tried was to setup a number of Selenium clients to pound the server, but that turned out to be fairly challenging to the machine doing the testing. It was not possible to set up more than 10 clients on a fairly strong machine.
Have you ever (or have your customers) created and edited a page in one language only to realize that their selected locale was wrong? Have you ever wished you could delete a master language branch of a page after creating its localized counterpart but you could only delete the newly created slave language instead? Have a customer ever requested that they could copy a whole branch and you convert it to another language so that they could then translate in-place?
Immediately after you implement the VirtualPathProvider proxy from my previous post you will notice a one fairly serious lack in it. Namely all the files within that provider will be hiding behind the registration form. That is not cool for a couple of reasons?
You may want to keep all of the files in one store – being forced to put them into a designated folder is not desired.
You may want to make some file freely available for some time and lock it after a while, or the other way around (e.g. to allow the robots to crawl it initially). having to move them is just silly and defeats the purpose.
So how do you discriminate the files that you want locked from those that you want to be publically available, and potentially from those that you want only the logged in users to be able to get?
With the culture of knowledge sharing and open source spreading, everyone races to show they have something valuable that you may want. And while you may not ask for money for your content you may still want to get something in return, say a contact, an email address that’s verified (or not), to keep in touch with the consumer of your content.
Yet a full fledged registration doesn’t seem like a proper thing to do – cluttering your EPiServer user repository with (let’s face it – for a large part fake or temporary email addresses that user create only to get your content).
Once you’ll update the framework to the extended one, you will immediately notice that… nothing has changed. Hmm… did something go wrong?
Well, not really. By default the framework will be run in the “legacy mode”. Thanks to an old article by our own Marek Blotny, I’ve learned how to build Plugin settings which are just perfect for the purpose!
So to configure and enable the new features you need to open your admin UI and in the “Config” click on the “Plugin Manager” item and select our framework plugin as shown in the picture
Back in the day when we started designing our last project we’ve been presented with a following problem – a big number of templates with slightly different sidebars.
Hmm…
Is sidebar a part of content? No, rather not. We don’t want the editors to have to setup the sidebar for every article they write (and the site has a few dozens of articles created on it every day).
Is sidebar more of a template thing? Well… more like it, but still… we have articles all over the site with different sidebar elements when the articles are in different parts of the site (ok so we could add rules what controls display in which part of the site). But wait! There’s more! The sidebar will be different for every language (region). Now we’re talking a dozen of templates or a rules engine just to make the sidebar different. Customising the template with properties isn’t ideal either as it makes EPiServer UI very cluttered. Additionally we want to change sidebars across many templates so the whole branch/section of the site will be able to share the same sidebar.
You’re editing your EPiServer 4 project and suddenly the edit mode stops working. the server reports compilation errors. something along the lines:
Compiler error: CS0433: Type ?EPiServer.Global? exists in ?c:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\EPiServer\5.1.422.122__8fe83dea738b45b7\EPiServer.dll? and ?c:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC\EPiServer\4.61.5.83__8fe83dea738b45b7\EPiServer.dll?
The solution is to go to your web.config and edit the compilation section. The section will most probably look something like this:
in my case only the 4th line referencing the EPiServer.dll was interfering with the editing working, but this can easily be trimmed to only first 3 options, so once you’re done with removing CMS5 entries it could look something like:
The configuration of the module is a descendant of any EPiServer Virtual Path Provider configuration. This aspect is fairly well described on EPiServer pages.
A sample configuration for the TextImageVirtualPathProvider can look as follows
physicalPath is where the cached version of images will be stored
shownInFileManager is “false” as there is nothing to present for the user in the file manager.
allowedReferrers is the regular expression containing the filter for sites that are allowed to access the path provider and get images. This has been added so that your server does not turn into the internet’s text-image open service :)
allowNullReferrer should be set to false in production environment but allows for testing by directly creating URL’s without using a page to fill in the referrer.
replacementStrings – this one actually turned out to be very useful since some characters are invalid and not even reaching the VPP if EPiServer or ASP detects them. so to allow for characters like colon or < or even a dot (which would make it hard to form regular expression if it was explicitly available) or * you need to create an escape token for them. The string is a coma separated list of token,value,token,value,…
virtualPath is something you need to change if you want your VPP to serve images under a different root level folder. (e.g. if you have a page with that name already)
Additionally for IIS6 (most common scenario) you need to add node to configuration for the VPP to work.
The module code is already available on Epicode SVN, the relevant wiki pages will be following as soon as documentation is complete.
The use case is as follows:
The client wants the site to look exactly as in a template provided as a image,
the text is using a non standard font that is not available on 60% of Windows machines,
the site does not use flash.
the site needs to be equally good looking in IE6 (more about it later)
The solution was to generate images, but how to do it the right way? This has presented us with a once-in-a-lifetime :) opportunity to create a virtual path provider, do something good and learn something new & cool in the process.
We’ve not been talking much about it and that’s partially my fault as well (busy with other projects), but Cognifide has a really cool initiative called Cognifide Labs that we intend to grow over time. The plan is to devote up to 10% company time into side projects that help us grow expertise and allow our devs to dwell into interesting technologies, methodologies and languages and develop their skills.
One of the first projects (that I took part in) is CogniScale - an app that allows FlexiScale users to manage their servers. Here’s the story…
I’m really glad to notice that Marek is getting into blogging about EPiServer. Marek is a really bright developer and a colleague at Cognifide with a number of successful EPiServer projects in his portfolio, we’ve worked together on Faceted Navigation (he’s the brain behind all the nifty editors in it) that I’m working on open sourcing of currently, and on the Setanta Sports Portal and the Setanta corporate site projects. Now he’s out in the wild writing about it. Go ahead and read his analysis on the performance of Episerver 4.x versus CMS 5. It appears that the CMS is getting… nah… I won’t spoil it for you… Read all about it on Marek’s brand new blog!
This article is a part of the series describing the faceted navigation system for EPiServer that we have developed in Cognifide and that’s already proven to be a robust solution for delivering tagged content a heavy traffic site. The engine will be released shortly as an open source project.
So how is the faceted engine structured?
Content provider
As you can see the driving force behind the engine is the Facet Tagged Content Provider. If you know EPiServer, the basic functionality of the module is roughly an an equivalent of find page with criteria for categories, which allows for searching pages tagged with facets with exclusion of some other facets and tagged some optional data, the module however is paging and and allows you to plug a feedback event handler so that your controls can accept or deny a story before they are sent to is and take part in the paging. The stories are provided to you in reverse order of publishing so you always get the latest stories first, (pretty much what any blog and any news site wants).
This article is the second of a series describing the faceted navigation system for EPiServer that we have internally developed in Cognifide, that’s already proven to be a robust solution for delivering tagged content a heavy traffic site, which will be released shortly as an open source project.
First of all we have to explain the nomenclature as it is going to be used quite a bit. A few terms we use pretty extensively are:
…with an unconventional approach to data fetching.
This article is a first of a series describing the faceted navigation system for EPiServer that we have internally developed in Cognifide and that’s already proven to be a robust solution for delivering tagged content a heavy traffic site, which will be released shortly as an open source project. The article outlines some pitfalls of EPiServer that we’ve run into and the nature of the project in which the module was used first and which influenced a lot of our design decisions.
This is a slightly dated post (written around November last year), that I forgot to post some time ago, so bare in mind, we’ve already started working on the faceted navigation getting open source status and I’ve updated the first sentece to include Adam Matusiak joining our team - Welcome Adam!
Over the last month or two our hive mind has assimilated two new voices, our thoughts have become one with Greg’s, and Adam’s.
There is a really heartwarming article (if you’re from Poland) on Silicon Valley Watcher about the skills of Polish engineers, the low turnover and the general satisfaction from Polish employees by international companies something that UK as a country discovered and Cognifide in particular have noticed quite a while ago.
And I really can fully relate to that, I would bet any money to stand the competency of any person in my crew against any of the top professionals out there. It definitely is a good time to be in the IT business in here. A small excerpt - worth noting:
Just a daily time saver, for reuse at another time.
Any old time windows developer, will remember the fun of using the ini files with GetPrivateProfileString. As much as ini files sucked there is one nice aspect of that call - you can setup a default value it is to return in case a value is not specified in the file. Similarly in a daily episerver programming you usually want to read a value but if one is not epcified you will usually want to use another value and just move along with the progress, and not really care to have an if there to do the filling in. Not to limit the property to any specific type - the task can be nicely solved with generics to handle pretty much any type of property.
I’ve been on a sole task today to improve a database performance of the project we’ve been working on. As much as I enjoyed the task there is one thing that costed me quite a bit of head scratching. Being a standard nerd I usually have about 20-30 applications running on my machine at a time, I didn’t immediately associated the error with the tuning advisor but rather assumed it’s one of my other 29 applications/servers/daemons/services in background did something stupid, probably even some of my code craving for a bit of attention, right? So I moved to tune the database on the server via remote desktop, but when I hit a wall there I’ve looked around for the solution and it looks like that it’s been known to MS for almost 2 years now.
As much as I seem to be enjoying my trip with EpiServer there are some little things I don’t seem to appreciate all that much and I’m not quite sure how to work around some of them in an elegant way.
EpiServer has a fairly advanced way of dealing with properties but it also seems to be a bit tough on the developer whenever you try to do something more than just strictly using its API-s. One of the areas I don’t really enjoy is the dealing with the pages that are expired or generally unavailable for the user for various reasons.
As we’ve been debating with Steve in the EpiCode IRC channel (Come on, join us there! You know you want it!) a few days ago, probably one of the biggest missing features in EPiServer is multi-page property.
adding a great number of consecutive pages is a tedious process
it’s not native to EPiServer, meaning - if I use it in my module that I would like to distribute later I need to put the control there. Short of potential licensing issues, this introduces an unnecessary complication level for such distributable modules
Another big issue with the page selecting dialog - apart form being unable to select multiple pages is its inability to root it anywhere outside the original EPiServer repository root. This really limits its quality in terms of re-using of its functionality to be able to use it for selecting of a limited set of pages.
Searches paged in the database have posed a problem in SQL Server at least prior to version 2005. I’ve found some solution to the problem on the net but they were so cludgy that I would never really put anything like that in a production server. I hope the following will shed some light on how they work in general by using in in EPiServer context.
Theoretically in EPiServer you can pull the pages that match the criteria from the database with EPiServer.Global.EPDataFactory.FindPagesWithCriteria() into the PageList but that seemed to be imposing a strong performance penalty with increased number of pages meeting the criteria. Since this search is sometimes done even multiple times on a page request in our project we needed something better.
Our friends at EPiServer AB has just let us know that they are in need of EPiServer CMS specialists that might be looking forward to working with them directly, so if you’re an EPiServer professional and meet the requirements specified on the recruitment page give them a shout!
If you’re not already familiar with EPiServer you’re probably not going to make it this round, but then again I suggest you start looking at it now. EPiServer AB is a really dynamic company recently expanding aggresively on the international markets - and rightly so. EPiServer is deserving every credit it can get. I can say that my journey with it so far has been really smooth and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. So if you’re not up to it, get ready for the next round, in the mean time, grab yourself a login - download a copy of the documentation from the Knowledge Center, a demo license and join us on the Developer Forum.
It’s a great bunch, really fun to work with.
I’ve discovered yesterday on Steve’s blog that him and our other friends on EpiCode have gathered on IRC (something I’ve been lobbying here at our company for quite a while). Come, drop by, let’s meet!
I’ll definitely try to hang out there as much as I can. great to meet you guys.
As Steve suggests - grab yourself a copy of XChat or aMirc, connect to irc.freenode.net and /join #epicode
What a great idea!
Thereseems to be a storm over at over at the Internet about Microsoft going Cross platform and “opening the common language runtime to a multitude of platforms”. What seems to be a false perception that even such respectable podcasts as Buzz Out Loud or even TWIT fail to realize and mislead people on is that this has NOTHING to do with portable .Net desktop applications. Someone even suggested at one of the BOL podcasts that it’s Microsoft’s attempt to put .Net Framework on Linux servers. (Huh? Beg your pardon?) You may have not noticed it but when they say about cross-platform capability of Silverlight it always says Windows, Mac.. and then on a single breath they start enumerating browsers. A casual listener just measures the quantity and the list has an impressive 5-6 bullets. heh… wait… erm… not really… it’s actually only 2 platforms. You cannot enumerate browsers as platforms! You share 99% implementation between them, the only cross-browser thing is the interaction between the plugin and the host browser!
I’ve recently been asked by one of our new dotNet developers whether it’s possible to cast your regular everyday .Net 1.x System.Collections.ArrayList or the like onto a generic System.Collections.Generic.List . I have to admit, I seem to suffer from some kind of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder when it comes to programming problems. I mean my original reaction is usually “Of course not, what kind of frivolous idea is that?”, but then I cannot go about without solving the problem. So it was this time.
Since my effort towards making this control final has been somewhat limited lately, I’ve decided to simply release the code at its current stage so that others can play with it and perhaps we can have something decent done together. The control operation is described in my previous article therefore I will not be going much into it any longer. the deployment of it is something worth mention though…
Download the control form here. Extract the contents of the zip file to a folder and attach the project to your solution, make sure you have the proper EPiServer libraries referenced form the project or it may complain about the references being broken.
To finalize my mini series on the object store I’d like to put a simple page comments library. The library takes care of everything that is required for you to post and retrieve a list of comments. It does not (so far) offer any moderation functionality or even facilitates any comments removal. It’s something that I will most probably be added in the process.
I am in the process of figuring out how I can contribute it through the Community EpiCode effort on CodeResort. As soon as I get some answers from Steve, I’ll get it uploaded there. In the mean time let me document how to start using it.
I think we’re mostly finished investigating ObjectStore for now. In this article I’ll try to finish up on the apsects of using the Object store in a real life solution that is a basic Page comments. In my previous article concerning ObjectStore I have described a way of storing and retrieving an object from the Store, which is fine and dandy if we know exactly the object’s OD, for example if we reference it from a page. But what good is a store like that if we cannot search it for content? The problem we were trying to solve using ObjectStore was storing comments for ANY Episerver page without having to do anything to the page type. We might need that for the upcoming project so the discovery may prove useful since this is a really neat way of storing objects.
EPiServer developer-to-developer forum holds an article on how to make EPiServer 4.61 run on Vista. I suspect that EPiServer CMS (a.k.a. EPiServer 5) will not have any of the described problems, but in the mean time I’m happily hacking my EPiServer on my other machine as well.
I’ve managed most of the way before and had the server running here, but it was having all sorts of problems, which are all gone after applying the suggestions (especially in the second post).
We’ve been looking at the way to efficiently store a lis of quotes some time ago. And Steve suggested that if we’re to store a gian number of quotes, we may look into some misterious being called ObjectStore…
If there will be many qoutes, e.g. you buy a “100.000 quotes of the day” database, you might want to put them into a separate table in the database. Seasoned EPiServer developers tend to think that everything can be stored as pages in EPiServer, which is kind of true, but not necessarily wise.
Another option could be to store the quotes in the ObjectStore, the general EPiServer storage feature, which can hold about anything you’d like, efficiently, quickly restorable, searchable, indexable, highly available and environmentally safe. It might even solve the global warming problem while we’re at it. Ok, maybe not. Truthfully, only a few developers outside of EPiServer know how to use it, and quite alot of us inside have no clue whatsoever. But, the tales I’ve heard about it would nominate it as a prime candidate for a quote system like this. Right now, it is storing things like XForms definitions and data, WSRP stuff, Content Mirroring data and lots more. It’s been around since 4.50 (I think) and is said to be documented - eventually, until then I guess we’ll have to resort to other ways of doing things.
Since IIS on XP seems to be handling only one site at a time and I have multiple installations of EpiServer for different purposes on my machine I needed a fast way of switching between them.
Sure I could go to the administration console and do it manually, but hey, why waste 30 seconds every time you do it when you can actually batch waste them in a chunk of half an hour to automate it.
so here’s my findings.
The adsutil.vbs is the script you want to get intalled on your system somewhere in the search path. %systemroot% will do.
You will find the script on your XP CD in the \i386 folder. Unpack with the following command:
I’ve recently had a chance to write a Google Maps control for EPiServer, it’s still somewhat buggy and I’m still considering how to release it since it still contains some java script that is potentially GPL infected and I would not like to contaminate someone’s code with it. I may end up rewriting it to some extent or make it more server side so that it’s completely ASP based.
Anyway…
We’ve started working on the rewrite of our site internally in a few CMS’es basically creating an internal competition on which of the engines/teams can do the best the easiest and the fastest site. I can say honestly, EPiServer has been a blast! Virtually any control we’ve decided to place there was almost completely effortless. The controls that are delivered (with sample usage on the demo site) just seem to cover everything. Well, almost everything. There is no map creation component as far as I can tell.
I’ve been wanting to write this control for quite a while and since I deployed a wiki for my family and started filling it in. I had a really nice experience with this Google Map extension to the MediaWiki. I wanted us to have the same on our site. And in the mean time we’ve started running into some limitations that required us to write some plugins for the editor’s site of the CMS. Striking two birds with one stone, here comes the Google Maps for EpiServer.
Anyone familiar with EpiServer knows that the CMS allows you to define the content on any given page through a set of properties defined for its page type. There is a handful of those, and each of them comes with a specific editor. Some of them even come with so called DOPE (Dynamic-on-page-editing). This feature is really so cool that by itself it’s probably one of the driving selling factor. I wanted it all!
To deliver it you need to inherit a property, (in my case I decided to go with a LongString as I can easily go over the 255 char limit if the user woudl decide to have more than a couple of flagpoints on his/her map) and define its editors.
I’ve found out that the property can be easily integrated with the CMS (virtually without any user intervention) by means of attributes/reflection. So here we go:
I’ve just read a blog about a few new additions to C# 3.0 and in the context of what we’ve already learned about the whole “Orcas” project that is the simplest conclusion.
Microsoft .Net Framework designers and coders are just a bunch of programmers who you can clearly see enjoy hat they do. I can’t stress enough how many times I’ve been annoyed to be forced to wrap some private variables in the obvious public properties. No longer!
Instantiating a class followed by a bunch of setting of properties? Now done in one line. Shweet.
One may argue that C# is a set of such syntactic sugar. But then again, I am sure that’s why so many programmers really like it. Even some of the most Java oriented programmers (Yes Albert I’m looking at you!) in our company are looking forward to work on .Net.
It is the general perception here that, comparing to Eclipse, Visual Studio is a weak IDE in terms of pure code-writing-helpers, refactoring, and discovery of code dependencies. Only the next version will even be able to target more than 1 .net framework version… Please fix that crap… But the language designers are continually doing a great job.
Have a read on some:
Writing user documents for our company, I ’ve been using our corporate wiki a lot recently.
Confluence is incredible. I can honestly say I’ve not been impressed by a piece of software to that degree for quite a while.
I really like how it provides me with the possibility for creating small pages like “format specifications” and “installation info” which I can then assemble into e.g. “User’s manual” simple and seamless:
It’s a real joy to work in a international company, the problem we face are hardly ever matched by some locally based endeavours…
As some of our friends here at work, you may choose to reveal your current location to your skype buddies. This is nice and easy since you can just put it in your name or description and everyone will see where you are.This poses a problem should you really travel frequently, it is more likely than not, that your location tag will be out of sync.
As this is a something that happens for them once in a while I found it an interesting concept, fun enough to be worth solving it :)
So how does one establish his location? Short of installing a GPS on your machine, I would suggest checking your IP address and translating it based on one of the available databases.
The thought process goes as follows… [Read about the technical guts of the application in my article at Code Project]
The challenge - The site that we will be coding will have its pages tagged with episerver categories. Implement a control that will list all the pages tagged with a specific category.
The control aspx code seems looks pretty straightforward and is derivative of some other controls that are defined in the EPiServer sample site:
The wirst thing you will notice after looking at the code is that PageList is pretty much a standard ASP.NET reinvented and rehashed. GREAT! Sounds like we can use the Data binding, right? That’s also true:
EPiServer is an Interesting technology we’ve started working on recently. I will try to blog my impressions and the progress over the course of learning the solution.
Since I just seem unable to learn by reading docs I chose to build an email obfuscating (antispam) control and a paged search as an exercise and a way to learn the guts of the EPiServer.
A couple of loose thoughts for a start…
Translation
I am not sure I fully appreciate the way the translation is performed for the parts of the system that is editor independent . The translation is done by means of xml files stored on the disk in the /lang folder.
Basically what that means is that it’s much more prone to missing translations and thus is not as translation friendly as it could fairly easily be.
For the content I can always fall back to the e.g. english version and look what’s the original value there. not so much for the framework translations. Is there a tool for that? I will investigate that later as we’ll probably want to create a number of controls for the website we’ll be working on soon, and that will need to be translated to many languages. And not just that but also the original template files - we will need much more than what’s available originally in EPiServer.
So once you define your control’s content:
Most of us here use Pandora for the listening to the music with their headphones.
The keyboards we have at the office do not have any sound volume adjusting keys.
It’s mildly annoying that you need to take off your headphones every time someone talks to you or click the system tray every time the musinc is too quiet or too loud. But hey! What do we have CodeProject and Visual Studio for?
Quick investigation on CP allows to determine that there is a way for a DotNet app to both control the system volume and hook the keyboard events fairly easily.
Half an hour later…
We have a little tray application for adjusting the system volume control
The only visual indication of the app running is a tray icon. While it is running you can:
I’ve done some research about Visual studio plugins recently, just so that I can close the tabs and move on here are some links that I cound to contain some useful information:
1PerformanceCounterpc=newPerformanceCounter("System","System Up Time"); 2 3//Normally starts with zero. do Next Value always. 4pc.NextValue(); 5 6TimeSpants=TimeSpan.FromSeconds(pc.NextValue()); 7 8MessageBox.Show(Environment.MachineName+ 9" has been up for \n\n"+10(ts.Days<1?"":ts.Days+" days, ")+11(ts.Hours<1?"":ts.Hours+" hours, ")+12(ts.Minutes<1?"":ts.Minutes+" minutes ")+13" and "+ts.Seconds+" seconds.");
[Edit: I’ve posted it on CodeProject and there are some greatl people commenting on it that did the investigation on ho to wrap it in a STA Thread and make it a part of your ASP.Net solution - really cool stuff!]
An interesting use case. Darek (our beloved sys admin - we all bow to him and worship his skills) has recently asked if it’s possible to write a .net application to make a thumbnail of a website. Which is pretty trivial with Windows forms actually.
All you really need to do is drop a WebBrowser on your form and once it’s loaded the page call:
go ahead and try it! I’m writing this article in it! As cool as WordPress is, it’s writing editor sucks. I don’t tend to write often, but when I start, my articles usually take more than a page and if in the process I accidentally press the shortcut for the browser go-back… I’m crying! I also wonder if you’ve ran into the 1000 miles long line bug in the WordPress editor? It seems to sometimes make all spaces in the line non breakable, there is a solution to this, which is to press enter and then go back to the line again and delete and re-insert all the spaces again… which makes me cry some more! I am also just not a big fan of Web interfaces for something so interactive as creating documents or calculations (hint, hint Google). I think Web is more suited for presentation whereas desktop is for creation.
The new project is really exciting. Not that we didn’t expect that, the number of new technologies we get to explore is incredible.
I’ve just finished setting up an automatic build and deployment (of a desktop application) environment consisting of SVN+Nant+CruiseControl+ClickOnce. The system is centered around CruiseControl which detects any commit in the trunk in the SVN repository and every time it’s changed, it calls Nant to pull source code from our SVN, at which point it compiles the source into binary artifacts and put them up on our release server. This means that every time you change anything and commit it to the repository - a minute or two later - any tester can get a working copy of your build to look at, without any intervention on your part, but there’s more…
I’m about to help a few guys here with their transition from Java to .Net, namely to C#.
I thought it may actually be a good idea to gather a few helpful links together for you. Stuff I found useful while I was phasing into the joys of the .Net framework a while ago.
The official stuff
First and foremost C# is an ECMA regulated standard. And as such is pretty well documented. ECMA allows you to download PDF e-books regarding the standardized part of the language:
Those that met me more than once know what a geek I am, my eyes basically glow on a sight of a cool new gadget. My wife on the other hand, couldn’t care less, she is as far from a geek as it gets. An email? Something needs to be found on The Web? Why learn anything when you have a guy next to you doing it all for you when you need it, and being hapy about it too!
[Updated 11 May 2005] Read at the end of the article.
I’ve been on a quest to improve a skin today and to do so I needed to extract a big archive in a proprietary and not widely supported format and get the images out of it and into the skin. Turned out the first part was not as bad as I expected as I’ve found some tools on the net to do this and Kris helped with the tool to convert the images in the proprietary format into TGA’s. Now here’s where the pain begun.
Browsing the WindowBlinds skins on Wincustomize and applying them is a source of a lot of joy, but there’s also a drop of frustration. There are some common problems with the skins that skinners notoriously forget to check for. Perhaps my working environment is not typical but since you’ve went all the way to create a skin it’s relatively easy to make it a perfect skin for everyone. So here are the 10 things I find most common to be wrong with a lot of skins:
Last week it has been brought to my attention that our Blog Navigator can no longer post web articles. Alas, this was only a symptom of a much worse disease, but first things first…
This month in a noble effort of making the Windows platform more secure for us and our (perhaps future) kids ;) Microsoft rolled out a new set of updates, among which is this one innocently called MS05-013 and located in Microsoft Knowledge Base under a mysterious KB891781.
First of all let me express how excited I am about the release of Blog Navigator. I think we did a good job on it and I am trully amazed at our approach to its release.
Let me explain why. Mind that Stardock kept a guy :) ) on a payroll for a better part of a year to do this.
