Tales from the Evil Empire

Nick Mayne is one of the main developers working on Orchard 2.0, a.k.a. Orchard Core.

Rob King works for Bede Gaming, which specializes in providing a platform for gambling web sites. The company moved to Orchard in 2013, and has strong scalability requirements, with sites serving millions of requests per day.

Taylor Mullen from the ASP.NET team is a developer working on MVC Core 2.0. In this session, he went over the design of the new Razor Pages feature. He carefully explained what is difficult with MVC currently, in order to justify the feature. He actually started by showing what it’s not: it’s not PHP-like, and it’s not a new take on previous “ASP.NET Pages” features.

Daniel Stolt and Chris Payne from IDeliverable presented some new output caching techniques that they’ve developed. The problem that they’re solving is what happens when you have to output user-specific data into rendered contents. In those cases, you want to cache the constant parts of the output, while keeping holes dynamic. This is known as donut caching.

Jorge Agraz is opening the conference after Sébastien Ros’ keynote with a talk about using external data in Orchard. Jorge work for Onestop, a company that builds e-commerce sites. Their web sites get their commerce data from APIs and then used to display that through their controllers with Orchard shapes. They attempted to use widgets instead of controllers, but that came with some significant maintenance problems.

Here’s a minor inconvenience that I’m going to put out there in the hope that one or two of the horrible people responsible for it may realize the errors of their ways and make the world a marginally better place.

What's interesting about debacles such as the recent left-padding madness is how it can get you to re-think seemingly obvious concepts, and challenge some basic assumptions. Here's in particular a little reflection that just occurred to me on the way between the bathroom and my office, and that may seem super-obvious to some of you. It wasn't to me, so here goes, I'm sharing…

Orchard adds RSS automatically to everything that looks like a list of content items: blog posts, of course, but also comments, projections, lists, search results, tags, etc. I’ve explained before how RSS works internally, but adding a new feed from code can look like a daunting task if you’re not an experienced Orchard developer. Fortunately, there is another feature related to RSS that makes it possible to create custom RSS without writing a line of code.