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:

expand E:\i386\adsutil.vb_ %SystemRoot%\adsutil.vbs

Assuming that E: is your CR-ROM drive.

You can find the user’s reference for the script on the Microsoft page

You may want to make sure that your Episerver is running in the default location by using the following call:

Cscript.exe %SystemRoot%\adsutil.vbs SET /W3SVC/1/ROOT

But since you’re probably having only one web server running on your machine anyway (why would you read it otherwise) probably the only thing you really need to do is:

Cscript.exe %SystemRoot%\adsutil.vbs SET /W3SVC/1/ROOT “C:\Inetpub\MyEPiServer###”

Another great tool I use that’s actually built into windows is reg.exe. this tool actually allows you to modify registry from command line. this was actually my initial approach to changing the path. It didn’t succeed to actually change the IIS root – but still it did the modification to the registry (that IIS just merrily ignored).

reg.exe ADD “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC\Parameters\Virtual Roots” /v “/” /d “C:\Inetpub\MyEPiServer###,,201” /t REG_SZ /f

This is however good for changing some database settings if anything is stored in the registry before restarting the IIS, which is can be scripted as:

net stop W3svc
net start W3svc

So to summarize… my script for switching sites ends as:

@echo off

set root_folder=C:\Inetpub\MyEPiServer2\
set adscript_location=%SystemRoot%\adsutil.vbs

echo Switching IIS to %root_folder%
Cscript.exe %adscript_location% SET /W3SVC/1/ROOT “%root_folder%”
net stop W3svc
net start W3svc

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:

namespace Cognifide.EPiServerControls.GoogleMaps

{

  [global::EPiServer.PlugIn.PageDefinitionTypePlugIn(

    DisplayName = “GoogleMapData”, Description = “Google Map”)]

  public class GoogleMapProperty : EPiServer.Core.PropertyLongString

  {

   …

  }

}

Yay! one line of code and my class is a property and will show up in the system as one of the available data formats. Now how cool is that!?

The cool part of it is that now as it’s a property, it’s even easier to integrate it with the page.

<%@ Page language=”c#” Codebehind=”GoogleMapsPage.aspx.cs”

    AutoEventWireup=”True”

    Inherits=”development.Templates.GoogleMapsPage”

    MasterPageFile=”~/templates/MasterPages/MasterPage.master” %>

 

<%@ Register TagPrefix=”EPiServer”

    Namespace=”EPiServer.WebControls” Assembly=”EPiServer” %>

 

<asp:ContentContentPlaceHolderID=”MainRegion” runat=”server”>

  <EPiServer:Property ID=”MyGoogleMap” runat=”server”

  PropertyName=”GoogleMapData” />

</asp:Content>

That’s it! The CodeFile is practically empty, except for the autogenerated part. The property instance knows by itself that is should pull the data from the page property defined in “PropertyName”!

The control supports all 3 modes:

– View Mode – obviously:

– Edit mode – can’t do without it:

I initially planned to put the dope-like editing there but for some reason EPiServer scripts kept interfering with the JavaScript defined for the control. Didn’t give it too much thought though what I really wanted to work good is…

– DOPE mode – this is probably the coolest thing in the whole deal:

The only problem I still have with the last mode is that most of the code for the DOPE mode I have is a modified version of what comes originally from the MediaWiki Google Map extension. Since JavaScript is not my core competence, I’ve only modified it to the extent that was needed for the code to work and therefore before save, you need to copy the dynamically generated code that’s just below the editing controls and into the edit box. Lame, I know. But I don’t really fancy learning Java Script further right now and it was not the point of this exercise. Perhaps if the control is released someone will be kind enough to fix and extend it so that it’s more streamlined.

The article is based on the knowledge I’ve gathered and work I’ve performed for Cognifide. Cognifide is an official partner EPiServer and the real contributor of the the control.

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:

• February/March Orcas CTP Now Available
• ASP.Net additions
• New C# “Orcas” Language Features: Automatic Properties, Object Initializers, and Collection Initializer
• A blogger on LINQ (Language-Integrated Query)
• Blinq – generate the database editing site with a single command line call
• I strongly suggest you look at some of the videos of Anders hajlsberg (the main .Net designer) linked form here

Microsoft ,may be the most annoying company in any other context, though you can’t help but to feel that sweet and sticky loving goo leftover on your cursor avery time you flip a page….

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:

{include:InstallGuide}
{include:CommandLineInterface}

It’s so neat, it’s actually a pleasure to work with it. Need a document to provide to your customer? No problem – it will create a PDF file from that page so that the customer can even print it out conveniently. Bliss…

So I’ve decided that I want to get a wiki for myself. I want to create a wiki with some of my code sippets for the everyday use, some small text handling utility classes, simple solutions, with some coding standards for myself to use, and for my family… to be able to share the family annual stuff like birthdays or important dates, phones, addresses, some basic photos, some experiences and some simple facts, like which pizzerias we consider good, where do we plan to perform our next family meeting and so on and so forth. Accessible for all of us online.

The hosting provider however does not allow me for shell access and java, so Confluence is out of the question (it has a free private license for 2 users which would otherwise be just fine).

I’ve asked around and it looked like mediaWiki might be the answer, so our MediaWiki seems to be up and running. I am not sure though if it’s just me being a noob, but the administering of it seems to be a major pain in the rare. Need permissions changed? Edit php. Add new user without enabling public access to the wiki? looks like you’re facing the the grief of dealing with myPHPAdmin.

And the editing support is almost as good as notepad… *sigh*. There is no way my dad is going to use it in its current state. We’re definitely in need of some nicer theme for it that won’t leave him running form it, screaming. Perhaps I can equip it with some plugins as well to make it bareable?

Short of that, I think I’m still in the market for another wiki engine.

[update]
I’ve also setup TikiWiki for testing, although it seems a bit overwhelming for a casual user. I’ll see about customizing it for the family.

I’ll also be looking at Twiki in the following days.

I’m sure soon enough the kids or at least Martuska will want to have access to it. Boy, would it be nice to have a global family wikipedia, or what!?

There seems to be a plethorea of them to the degree that there are sites and huge matrices comparing them point by point.

Wikipedia comparison
WikiMatrix comparing some of the wikis I’m considering

[update 27-01-2007]
I think I’ll settle with media wiki after all. It’s really tedious to administer, but I can handle it. While tiki seems a bit too complicated and I think the family could have had troubles using it.

Download source files – 103 Kb
Download the Skype Geo Location tool – 52 Kb

Introduction

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 Convergence – The Application

The application helps you maintain your location tag in your name so that whenever you travel to a different town your skype name/description will reflect it.

Disclaimer: The application uses GeoIPTool as its source of IP and geo-location. Visit GeoIPTool for a wide variety of web based geo-location tools.

It does not contain either any kind of tracking abilities other than it letting you to maintain your location tag. The application will not even change your location tag by itself but rather it will notify you that your location has changed and will allow you to change your tag with a simple press of a button.

Usage
In your skype account set your name or description so that it has [] in it or press “Add location tab to…” in the application. Whenever the application will find those it will check if the text in the parenthesis matches your current location., if it does not it will suggest a new one and will highlight the relevant field red. You may set for this operation to be performed on every boot, you will however only be notified when/if your location actually changed.

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:

<%@ Control Language=”C#” AutoEventWireup=”false” CodeFile=”CategoryListing.ascx.cs” Inherits=”development.templates.Units.CategoryListing” TargetSchema=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5″ %>

<%@ Register TagPrefix=”EPiServer” Namespace=”EPiServer.WebControls” Assembly=”EPiServer” %>

 

<div id=”rightmenudivStartPage”>                       

    <div class=”listheadingcontainer”>

        <div class=”listheadingleftcorner”></div>

        <a class=”listheading leftfloating” href=”<%=EventRootPage.LinkURL%>“><%= EventRootPage.PageName %></a>

        <div class=”listheadingrightcorner”></div>

    </div>

 

    <EPiServer:PageList runat=”server” ID=”PageList1″>

        <ItemTemplate>

            <div class=”startpagecalendaritem”>

                <span class=”datelistingtext”>

                <episerver:property ID=”Property1″ runat=”server” PropertyName=”PageLink” CssClass=”StartCalendar” />

                <span class=”Normal”><episerver:property ID=”Property3″ runat=”server” PropertyName=”MainIntro” /></span>

            </div>

        </ItemTemplate>

    </EPiServer:PageList>

    <br/><br/>

</div>

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:

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

    if (!IsPostBack)

    {

        PageList1.DataSource = CategoryPages;

        DataBind();

    }

}

Does the trick of binding the data to the repeater… uh… oh… sorry… I mean PageList.

Now comes the hard and non-obvious part.

How does one actually find the pages assigned to a category? Short of calling the database directly to query the tblCategorypage table that comes to mind at first, it looks like EPiServer has a really cool page finding module that allows for simple yet fairly effective discovery of pages conforming to some developer defined criteria. Those criteria are defined by means of forming any necessary number of instances of PropertyCriteria class provided as a PropertyCriteriaCollection to Global.EPDataFactory. The result is handed to us back as a PageDataCollection. The fetching of the pages looks like this:

public PageDataCollection GetCategoryPages()

{

    PropertyCriteria criteria = null;

 

    CategoryList categories = ((PropertyCategory)(CurrentPage.Property[“AggregatedCategory”])).Category;

 

    criteria = new PropertyCriteria();

    criteria.Condition = CompareCondition.Equal;

    criteria.Type = PropertyDataType.Category;

    criteria.Value = categories.ToString();

    criteria.Name = “PageCategory”;

    criteria.Required = true;

 

    PropertyCriteriaCollection col = new PropertyCriteriaCollection();

    col.Add(criteria);

 

    PageDataCollection pdc = new PageDataCollection();

    pdc = Global.EPDataFactory.FindPagesWithCriteria(EPiServer.Global.EPConfig.StartPage, col);

 

    return pdc;

}

For this to work though, one has to define some more stuff in the web admin part of the site. the usual task is to define the Page Template for the control. In this case when you define the Page Template make sure to put the “AggregatedCategory” property in that should be of type Category selection. This property defines what categories you want your control to aggregate, and you can provide one or more of those. the other property that is required for this very control is “CategoryContainer” of type Page. This is solely for the purpose of having a master page that you define as the “main page” for the chosen category selection. It serves as a clickable header in the control. Unnecessary maybe but one would have to define a caption for the control anyway so why not make it meaningful.

The usage of the said control is trivial. A sample usage on the default EPiServer site looks like this:

<%@ Page language=”c#” Codebehind=”CategorySummary.aspx.cs” AutoEventWireup=”false” Inherits=”development.Templates.CategorySummary” %>

<%@ Register TagPrefix=”EPiServer” Namespace=”EPiServer.WebControls” Assembly=”EPiServer” %>

<%@ Register TagPrefix=”development” TagName=”CategoryListing”  Src=”~/templates/Units/CategoryListing.ascx”%>

<%@ Register TagPrefix=”development” TagName=”DefaultFramework”    Src=”~/templates/Frameworks/DefaultFramework.ascx”%>

 

<development:DefaultFramework ID=”DefaultFramework” runat=”server”>

    <EPiServer:Content ID=”Content1″ Region=”fullRegion” runat=”server”>

        <development:CategoryListing  ID=”CategoryContent” runat=”server”/>

    </EPiServer:Content>

</development:DefaultFramework>

Out of which really only the <development:CategoryListing  ID=”CategoryContent” runat=”server”/> part is meaningful.

For the record… It looks like THE place to go to solve that kind of dilemas fast is the EpiServer “Developer to Developer” forums.

*)… couldn’t ressist with the title joke :) For those not in subject… It’s a reference to a silly commercial of one of the market chain (Biedronka) in Poland that advertises recently with “My first *something*… from Biedronka*

The article is based on the knowledge I’ve gathered and work I’ve performed for Cognifide. Cognifide is an official partner EPiServer and the real contributor of the the control.

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:

<asp:LinkButton ID=”Obfuscate” runat=”server” CausesValidation=”False” OnClick=”ObfuscateEmail”>

    <episerver:translate Text=”/templates/emailobfuscator/obfuscate“ runat=”server” ID=”Translate3″ />

</asp:LinkButton>

in which you defined where the translation is to come from. (In this case the path is: “/templates/emailobfuscator/obfuscate”) you need to edito the template framework file and add the translation there with the XPath defined in the control. Which looks along the lines of:

<?xml version=“1.0“ encoding=“utf-8“ standalone=“yes“?>

<languages>

    <language name=“English“ id=“EN“>

        <templates>

            <emailobfuscator>

                <obfuscate>Obfuscate</obfuscate>

            </emailobfuscator>

            …

        </templates>

        …

    </language>

</languages>

The most annoying part of it though is that it needs to be done for alll the languages if you want the site to be fully translated, which without a tool is not fun.

I will look more into that later. One would expect that a tool like that may exist already.

Technology

I am really looking forward to EPiServer 5.x to be released. It’s to be based on ASP.NET 2.0 which most probably means (I hope)that a number of EPiServer specific technologies will be replaced by a .Net generic technologies. As the ElektroPost notices:

EPiServer Content Framework Is Not Unlike ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages and Content Pages.

Also the EPiServer seems to be really hard to develop for in VS.Net 2005. I still didn’t Indeed ElektroPost suggests VS 2003 as the development platform, but once switched to 2005 I personally can’t deal with VS 2003 any longer.

The good news though is that it is compatible with .Net 2.0 in a way that you can simply add an ASP 2.0 control and with just slight modifications work with it. You can also use .Net 2.0 partial classes – which means much cleaner code.

Overall the EPiServer is a really positive experience. I’m looking forward to work more with it.

The article is based on the knowledge I’ve gathered and work I’ve performed for Cognifide. Cognifide is an official partner EPiServer and the real contributor of the the control.

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:

• Ctrl + Alt + Up Arrow – Volume up
• Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow – Volume down
• Ctrl + Alt + Scroll Lock – Mute / Unmute
• Click the icon to het a baloon tooltim with those hints
• Right click the tray icon to close the app.

The icon has been taken from the Dement?con icon pack by MindlessPuppet.

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:

• HTML Code copy -Absolute must for any blogging .Net developer
• WatiN – Web applications testing in .Net – sounds like it might be THE framework for testing our web GUIs
• Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now
• Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility Contest Winners
• Introduction to GhostDoc – really funny tool that needs to be looked at – might be useful…. moderately. Definitely genuine.
• CodeKeep – THE repository for storing and sharing code snippets
• Visual Studio Power toys pack installer
• Christopher Bennage lists some nice and worth mentioning tools as well
• Seems like an interesting sanbox for some cool development ideas
• FX Cop
• NCoverExplorer – test coverage tool
• This is not really a .Net stuff biut rather an IE Addon but a great one at that!

PerformanceCounter pc = new PerformanceCounter(“System”,
    “System Up Time”);

 

//Normally starts with zero. do Next Value always.

pc.NextValue();

TimeSpan ts = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(pc.NextValue());

MessageBox.Show(Environment.MachineName +

    ” has been up for \n\n” +

    (ts.Days < 1 ? “” : ts.Days + ” days, “) +

    (ts.Hours < 1 ? “” : ts.Hours + ” hours, “) +

    (ts.Minutes < 1 ? “” : ts.Minutes + ” minutes “) +

    ” and “ + ts.Seconds + ” seconds.”);

Nice, neat and simple.

Get a compiled executable here