Cultiv

A few years ago, Morten wrote a great blog post about coming to Copenhagen for CodeGarden. Although I had been there the year before, I did learn a lot of things that were unclear to me the first time.As you may or may know, Morten and I are now colleagues ...

Read: The CodeGarden Guide to Copenhagen
This blogpost has 3 comments

This screencast shows you how to get a fully functional Umbraco site up and running in 60 seconds. Make sure you have WebMatrix installed.  ...

Read: From 0 to Umbraco site in 60 seconds
This blogpost has 4 comments

So, you really like the idea of the ASP.NET Web API and can't wait to use it? But you're using Umbraco 4 and / or Webforms? Good news everybody! It's super easy to use it. First of all: Umbraco. It has a compiled global.asax out of the box and ...

Read: How to use ASP.NET Web API in Umbraco 4 & .NET 4.0
This blogpost has 20 comments

One of the things that Umbraco 5 plugin developers have been struggling with from day 1 is ASP.NET aggressive caching of their assemblies. As it appears, after you build your plugin code and put the new dll into the plugins folder, many times the new code will not be used. ...

Read: Tip of the week: Clean those ASP.NET temp files
This blogpost has 3 comments

... Well: silly easy if you don't have too many requirements, but I did. Good news though: solved my problems in under 2 hours. What is the ASP.NET Web API? Well, according to Microsoft: "ASP.NET Web API is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that ...

Read: ASP.NET Web Api is silly easy

Last Friday I was explaining to a colleague that I can never remember how I write the jQuery document ready function. Instead I always: Go to cultiv.nl/blog Find the blog post of which I can never remember the title but it has a black icon of ...

Read: Tip of the week: ReSharper Code Templates
This blogpost has 3 comments

A few months ago I posted about outputting javascript objects (Json) using an umbraco's "/base". As you might've noticed, I've been becoming a fan of using Razor in Umbraco and had a bit of an epiphany the other day: why not use Razor to create my Json strings! ...

Read: Razor vs. "/base" to output Json in Umbraco
This blogpost has 29 comments

I've installed Umbraco a million times, so I know how it works. But sometimes people get frustrated when they're starting with Umbraco for the first time. Sorry XP users, this is written for Windows 7 (you really need to update your 11 year old OS, really). Also, ...

Read: How to install Umbraco manually
This blogpost has 36 comments

After having used Umbraco for 2 years, I keep looking for ways to make my life even easier. As you may know, initial deployment of an Umbraco site is super easy. But then, a few weeks later, you've enhanced your site, added fields and macros and suddenly.. you have to ...

Read: Umbraco developer productivity with uSiteBuilder
This blogpost has 16 comments

In my previous post I've shown the basics of using Razor. But I also wanted to find out what works better in XSLT versus in Razor. Luckily, my page needed paging. Paging is something relatively simple that requires a bit of logic, not something that is trivial to do in ...

Read: How to use Razor in Umbraco - Paging
This blogpost has 14 comments

This article is about the upcoming version of Umbraco (4.6.2), that uses normal .cshtml files instead of the .razor file extension. Examples will also be presented in HTML 5 format, so do remember that the tags are part of HTML 5, not Razor. Disclaimer: The Razor  implementation is still ...

Read: How to use Razor in Umbraco
This blogpost has 8 comments

There's a saying in Holland that translates to (literally): "A good beginning is half the work". While that is a bit of an exaggeration, starting with a good structure to your new Umbraco site can be very important. Last Friday I was skyping with my friend Yannick and he ...

Read: Tip of the week: The "ultimate" site structure setup
This blogpost has 22 comments

So Contour for Umbraco is really, really cool, that much is for sure! But.. Styling forms is really hard! You have to hack a lot of CSS to make a moderately sexy looking form. I am not a frontend developer so this usually ends badly. In fact, up ...

Read: Making Contour even sexier
This blogpost has 2 comments

So, you want to create and use javascript objects in Umbraco! Not a problem. I'll be showing you an example using "/base", Json.NET and a little bit of what I'm doing with Contour at the moment. /base Umbraco's "/base" is an extendable system for creating raw feeds directly ...

Read: Using "/base" to create and consume a JSON string
This blogpost has 8 comments

On Codegarden '10 I entered the package competition on a whim, after installing the shiny new Umbraco 4.5 on my laptop there. I was inspired to try and see if the package that I had not completely completed would work on 4.5 and when it did, I just added my ...

Read: PhotoMetaData package now available
This blogpost has 1 comment

Just a few weeks ago, someone showed me woorank, a very cool website analysis tool. Woorank tells you what you can improve on your website to help search engines find and evaluate your content better. By giving you a score from 0 to 100, you can easily compare your ...

Read: SEO optimizing in Umbraco
This blogpost has 4 comments

Recently, I was told that I was being a bother and that I shouldn't develop in VS2010. Sure, the current RC is not the final version, but it's a release candidate, not much will change between now and the RTM (unless something really bad happens). But sometimes you need to ...

Read: Convert between VS2008 and 2010 projects, automatically
This blogpost has 19 comments

Today, I had a little problem after adding some properties to a document type in Umbraco. I've had this problem before and I keep forgetting how to fix it. When opening a node of this document type (in Umbraco's Content area, not the document type editor), I get the ...

Read: Umbraco - Object reference not set..
This blogpost has 3 comments

Wow, who would've thought 10 months ago when I was introduced to Umbraco that I would be nominated to be an MVP? I sure didn't expect that! I'm not asking for votes, I'm proud to be listed among giants and you can make your own decisions. However, ...

Read: Umbraco MVP - Don't vote for me
This blogpost has 7 comments

Rather than making a long post with a lot of images, I decided to do something new for this post: a nice little 6 minute screencast! It's just a quick run through of how I create a new Umbraco installs on my dev machines. It's easy! I noticed ...

Read: Screencast: Installing Umbraco
This blogpost has 13 comments

If you've been reading my blog, it should be clear by now that I'm a bit of a fan of the Git version control system. I've been hosting some projects on Unfuddle for a while now, but have not been very happy with fiddling with SSH keys and setting ...

Read: Dropbox as a Git central repository
This blogpost has 5 comments

I'm running a very simple web server for Cultiv and some other projects. It's a virtual server to which I have full remote desktop access. This means that I am the administrator and I decide what goes on at the server, no interference by my hosting provider. But, as always, ...

Read: A basic backup strategy
This blogpost has 4 comments

Recently, I've been working on a site that presents 30 to a 120 items from Umbraco's media section in the frontend of the website. In the past few weeks, I've been tweaking the site for performance and noticed that there were an aweful lot of SQL queries being performed ...

Read: Released: Media cache package

So now that you've started using Git, you might want to share your repository with your team using a central repository. I'll show an example of how to do that by using a free account at Unfuddle.com. Sign up for Unfuddle and log in to your account (through your_account_name.unfuddle.com). ...

Read: Version control in Git - Part 3 (a central repository)

So you're ready to start using Git? Here's how to start: First of all, go and download and install the Git extensions for Windows. The featured (full) release is recommended. In Visual Studio, you'll now see a few new buttons (in Windows Explorer, there's also some new context ...

Read: Version control in Git - Part 2 (set-up and usage)

Version control systems are evil. They hate me and are out to get me. I can't count the number of ways that I've been bitten by SourceSafe (safe.. ha! get it?), CVS, SVN and TFS. Enter Git, my saviour. For now. I have literally worked with Git for three ...

Read: Version control in Git - Part 1

This is a really short tip: Don't create a new documentType with the alias "Folder". This alias has already been used by folders in the media section. In normal day-to-day use this is not a problem, but it becomes one when you try to programatically access the documentType by ...

Read: Umbraco tip of the week: "Folder" is not a good name for a documentType

Today, I was handed a piece of HTML which featured a login form. My assignment: create this in Umbraco, using the default Membership provider. This could be considered as an "Umbraco tip of the week", however this applies to ASP.NET webforms in general as well. I thought about ...

Read: Styling the ASP.NET login controls
This blogpost has 4 comments

This morning, I thought I'd protect my site a little better to get some understanding of what would be required to do so. First of all, I thought I'd enable Windows authentication om my /umbraco folder. Couldn't be easier, right? Wrong. Apparently, since I am using the .net ...

Read: Umbraco tip of the week - security on your live servers
This blogpost has 3 comments

I've just released a simple Umbraco package that will create a sitemap XML for submitting to Google and other search engines. The resulting XML is 100% compatible with the sitemap.org specifications (which should be supported by all the major search engines). ...

Read: Released: Search Engine Sitemap package

While building a website last week, I was looking for a way to make a simple contact form. Unfortunately, there was nothing available on our.umbraco.org. So I made my own package and it is now available for download. I've also added a tip to the forum to show how ...

Read: Released: Contact Form Package
This blogpost has 10 comments

So you start out building your website without knowing exactly what you are doing. You add new nodes under "Content" and it looks nice, but then you try adding navigation... The default XSLT navigation templates only work when you add a node under "Content" and then all of your ...

Read: Umbraco tip of the week: Redirects
This blogpost has 6 comments

Not only can you debug your umbraco site by adding "?umbDebugShowTrace=true" to the current URL, but you can also show a list of element in the page using "?umbDebug=true". Using the URL rewriting feature, you can also disable the debug querystrings so that you don't disclose too much information ...

Read: Umbraco tip of the week - Debugging from within the website

Every time you start a new Umbraco project, there is one thing that you will do first: Set-up a home page. As this takes a few minutes, I've created a simple package that will help you out by installing the home page. CleanHome will give you a ContentPage document ...

Read: Presenting: The CleanHome package

This seems like a very useful project, I'll definately be looking at it for future projects. Quote: "all of your style sheet and JavaScript files in your ASP.NET web application can be automatically minified, compressed, combined, and cached". http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/CssAndJavaScriptOptimizer.aspx...

Read: Efficient JS/CSS handling in .Net

I've been looking for the best way to debug when creating user controls for Umbraco, and there were no complete instructions available online. The simplest way for me has been as follows. When I create a new Umbraco website, I make a structure in my development folder of ...

Read: Easily debug your custom Umbraco user controls in Visual Studio
This blogpost has 7 comments