February 2011 - Posts
It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is...
Today I saw a post on stackoverflow.com asking Using Microsoft AJAX Minifier with Visual Studio 2010 1-click publish . This is a response to that question. The Web Publishing Pipeline is pretty extensive so it is easy for us to hook in to it in order to perform operation such as these. One of those extension points, as we’ve blogged about before, is creating a .wpp.targets file. If you create a file in the same directory of your project with the name {ProjectName}.wpp.targets then that file will automatically be imported and included in the build/publish process. This makes it easy to edit your build/publish process without always having to edit the project file itself. I will use this technique to demonstrate how to compress the CSS &...
Pluralsight (a great .NET training company) is offering the opportunity to watch their jQuery Fundamentals course for free for the next 36 hours. The course is presented by the most excellent Dan Wahlin and contains 5 hours of great end to end content. Pluralsight will be offering this jQuery Fundamentals course for free until Thursday evening (9pm PST). Pluralsight has about 100 other great training courses available similar to this one. They recently launched a new subscription plan that allows you to watch all of their courses online starting from $29 a month. They also offer a 10 day free trial option that you can use to try it out. You can learn more about it here . Free jQuery 1.5 Visual Cheat Sheet While on the...
We do have tutorials on the Orchard site , but we can't cover all topics, and recently I've found myself more and more responding to forum questions by pointing people to an existing module that was solving a similar problem to the one the question was about. I really like this way of learning by example and from the expertise of others. This is one of the reasons why we decided that modules would by default come in source code form that we compile dynamically . it makes them easy to understand and easier to modify for your own purposes. Hackability FTW! But how do you crack open a module and look at what's inside? You can do it in two different ways. First, you can just install the module from the gallery, directly from your Orchard...
Earlier this month the ASP.NET MVC developer community held the 2nd annual mvcConf event . This was a free, online conference focused on ASP.NET MVC – with more than 27 talks that covered a wide variety of ASP.NET MVC topics. Almost all of the talks were presented by developers within the community, and the quality and topic diversity of the talks was fantastic. Below are links to free recordings of the talks that you can watch (and optionally download): Scott Guthrie Keynote The NuGet-y Goodness of Delivering Packages (Phil Haack) Industrial Strenght NuGet (Andy Wahrenberger) Intro to MVC 3 (John Petersen) Advanced MVC 3 (Brad Wilson) Evolving Practices in Using jQuery and Ajax in ASP.NET MVC Applications (Eric Sowell) Web Matrix...
A CMS like Orchard is, by definition, designed to store content. What differentiates content from other kinds of data is rather subtle. The way I would describe it is by saying that if you would put each instance of a kind of data on its own web page, if it would make sense to add comments to it, or tags, or ratings, then it is content and you can store it in Orchard using all the convenient composition options that it offers . Otherwise, it probably isn't and you can store it using somewhat simpler means that I will now describe. In one of the modules I wrote, Vandelay.ThemePicker , there is some configuration data for the module. That data is not content by the definition I gave above. Let's look at how this data is stored and queried...
Orchard has its own caching API that while built on top of ASP.NET's caching feature adds a couple of interesting twists. In addition to its usual work, the Orchard cache API must transparently separate the cache entries by tenant but beyond that, it does offer a more modern API. Here's for example how I'm using the API in the new version of my Favicon module : _cacheManager.Get( "Vandelay.Favicon.Url" , ctx => { ctx.Monitor(_signals.When( "Vandelay.Favicon.Changed" )); var faviconSettings = ...; return faviconSettings.FaviconUrl; }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;...
This past weekend the ASP.NET team released NuGet 1.1 . Phil Haack recently blogged a bunch of details on the enhancements it brings, as well as how to update to it if you already have NuGet 1.0 installed. It is definitely a nice update (my favorite improvement is that it no longer blocks the UI when downloading packages). Read Phil’s blog post about the NuGet 1.1 update and how it install it here . NuGet is Not just for Web Projects NuGet is not just for ASP.NET projects – it supports any .NET project type. Pete Brown recently did a nice blog post where he talked about using NuGet for WPF and Silverlight Development as well. You can read Pete’s blog post about NuGet for WPF and Silverlight here . How to Install...
The Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference (MVCConf) happened earlier today. Several thousand developers attended the event online, and had the opportunity to watch 27 great talks presented by the community. All of the live presentations were recorded, and videos of them will be posted shortly so that everyone can watch them (for free). I’ll do a blog post with links to them once they are available. Special Pluralsight Training Available for Next 48 Hours In my MVCConf keynote this morning, I also mentioned a special offer that Pluralsight (a great .NET training partner) is offering – which is the opportunity to watch their excellent ASP.NET MVC 3 Fundamentals course free of charge for the next 48 hours. This training is 3 hours and...
One of the main goals of the Portable Library Tools is to be able to implement your ViewModel in the Portable Library such that you can share it between your UI in your Silverlight, Windows Phone, or even WPF project. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a challenge with the Portable Library Tools CTP, because it does not include ObservableCollection<T> or INotifyCollectionChanged. The reason for this is simple. The CTP doesn’t have references for System.Windows, and both ObservableCollection<T> and INotifyCollectionChanged are defined in System.Windows. That they are defined in this assembly isn’t the best in terms of layering, and we have been discussing what to do about that. But they are there, and we’re looking...
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