Using ildasm and ilasm to fix the EPiServer Mobile Pack

Ok, so a couple of days ago (or something) EPiServer released a module called Mobile Pack. It is built to make it easy for companies to get their website up and running for mobile browsers, which is pretty cool.

It uses “Visitor Groups” and a browser criterion to redirect mobile users to a mobile version of the website. A solution which is actually quite simple, but it works well, and simple well working things are great. At least it works in theory. Unfortunately, in the real world the code doesn’t work…

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My PageProvider returns no pages... on the first request

I spent a little time yesterday building a simple little PageProvider. For the record, it was an RSS PageProvider that would read an RSS fead and present the entries as pages... Not very complicated or special, but it needed to be done. It's going to be one of the exercises in the new advanced developer course for EPiServer. So, what was the problem...well...my provider worked, but only when I refreshed the page. The initial request would come up empty, but when I refreshed the page it would show up as it should...

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EPiServer GUI-plugin without ascx or aspx file

When creating a GUI-plugin you are basically either creating a usercontrol (ascx) or a webform (aspx). The problem with this is that when you deploy your plugin you have to deploy both an assembly and a second file. The location of the second file is of utmost importance since it is defined in the GuiPlugInAttribute's Url property. Is this a problem? Not in most cases, but once in a while it is. Can it be solved? Of course...

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A bragging post...

Once in a while you do get the possiblity to do something that is gonna be seen by the developer community more than others things you do. This week I got to create my first screencast for Microsoft Sweden. It turned into a WAY too long screencast covering basic development in Silverlight 2.0. Beside being shown and talked about on a couple of different blogs on the web, I also had the privilege of getting mentioned in the Swedish MSDN newsletter. So as I said...a pure brag entry telling the world that I got to do something cool. Unfortunately for all the enlish speaking people out there, the newsletter as well as my screencast is in swedish. But for the rest of you here are a couple of places where you can see or read about it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/robf/archive/2008/10/14/introduktion-till-utveckling-med-silverlight-2.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/msdn/mail/2008/msdnNyhetsbrev_081016.html
http://labs.episerver.com/en/Blogs/Per/Archive/2008/10/Sample-Silverlight-2--Dynamic-Content/
Somebody actually cares...maybe...might be that i know both Robert and Per and that they are just being nice to me...but I don't give a damn...I...Chris Klug was mentioned on the world wide web by other people than my family...

The complete n00bs guide to custom properties

One of the more usefull extension points in EPiServer is the ability to create custom properties. That and GUI Plug-Ins. Those 2 extensions are probably the easiest and most used way to extend the functionality in EPiServer CMS. So how do you create a custom property? Well there are several ways to learn it. You can either go to one of our courses at EPiServer, and maybe even meet me, or you could read an article about it on http://world.episerver.com. It is actually a good article written by one of our developers in Ukraine, Denis Yakovlev. But you could also read this blog entry.

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WCF Services and EPiServer

I just spent some time trying to get my WCF Service to work on my EPiServer CMS 5 R2 installation. It was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.

I had built this Silverlight application using a test application, launching it in the VS webserver and everything was working fine. It was a small Silverlight application that used a WCF service to get some data from the server. The epplication worked perfectly...until I decided to deploy it to my "real" site using IIS 7... The "real" site was an EPiServer application which caused some problems.

I deployedmy Silverlight app as well as my service to the site I was going to use. Deploying the application meant copying the xap file as well as the svc and assemmbly to the server. I also copied my service configuration to the web.config file. After this I opened my browser and browsed to localhost. And behold...a broken Silverlight application. The application started, but soon came to a screeching halt as it tried to connect to the service. Since the application actually loaded, I came to the conclusion that the IIS configuration for the Silverlight things were ok and that it was the service that was the problem.

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And the solution is AssemblyPart...

A couple of weeks ago I had a look at a "module" for EPiServer CMS 5. It's going to be a part of our new package called Create+, and is called InteractiveScene. It basically gives the editor the ability to add and configure Flash-based content using EPiServer.

So, how does this end up being an entry on my blog? Well, it got me thinking. But first off I have is to say that I'm not here to replace InteractiveScene in any way. Neither am I here to tell you to do it. My concept builds on top of InteractiveScene, using it, not replacing it. It would of course be possible to use my thoughts to use this outside of EPiServer, in which case you would have to build the parts that I use from InteractiveScene manually.

So, back to the question, why am I blogging about a third party application for EPiServer? And why the @#!*% am I blogging about something that is using Flash? Everybody knows what I think about Flash... I love it, but don't know how to use it. The whole idea about how to use Flash is built around people who have minds that don't work in the same way as mine. So...thats actually the answer to the question. The "education" I got in "IS" was mostly based around the editors interface. All the cool development is actually made in Flash and just configured through EPiServer and thats no good for me. So I do of course have to find a way to tweak the system to use Silverlight instead of Flash.

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Globalization Demo from Developer Summit '08

At the EPiServer developer summit a couple of weeks ago I held a session about multilanguage support in EPiServer. For those of you who were there, you know why I've added this entry. I screwed up the demo completely and promised to upload the demo code to my blog. My, at that moment, not existing blog. So here it is. I've created a blog and added the code for download.

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