This post isn’t really a blog post as such, I thought as I watch all the LINQ videos and read various websites I would document useful bits of information that I can reference millions of times over the next 2 years few months. 

I am going to be adding to this page more and more over the coming weeks too, to save having lots of different  More...

Something that should be so simple… *SIGH*… I had a moment earlier, trying to add a donate button to an Umbraco site I have just finished.  I just grabbed the code from the PayPal site

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_pdn_xclick_techview_outside

Changed the values to what I needed (TIP: If you leave out the ‘amount’ value it will prompt people to add in a value and perfect for a donation button) and put it in my site, published the page and it didn’t work – Even weirder it had stripped out my form tag just leaving the values.More...

Now I’m not sure who actually did this tutorial, and would LOVE to credit them – But I was googling around and found this amazing tutorial stuck in a Word file on ‘Live Office’.  I thought it was a waste being tucked away, so would post it here for everyone to use?  If anyone knows who wrote this please let me know as I’ll give them all the credit here, as its a great tutorial!!

In this tutorial you will:

a. Register for an Azure account

b. Install the requisite Web services, SDK and software

c. Claim your Azure token after the invitation code is received

d. Create a Hosted Service in Azure

e. Create a Visual Web Developer ASP.NET “cloud” project

f. Create or use existing .aspx website files and folders

g. Copy your created or existing .aspx website files and folders to the Azure WebRole

h. Upload your project to the Hosted Service in Azure

i. Stage the Web site on Azure

j. Test the Web site on Azure

k. Publish the staged project into production

l. Accept and Deploy your project in the Azure “cloud”.

Pre-requisites

Several pieces must first come together before hosting the Web site on Azure: Software must be installed, and Azure account must be created and token redeemed. This document will walk you through the process of obtaining all required software all the way through to publishing a simple Web site to Azure.

Also this document assumes you have already created a website on your local PC and the website has .aspx web pages and associated folders. In this example, Microsoft Expression Web 3 was used to create a simple website. More...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away I started a little project to help me learn ASP.NET C# in more depth, I called it ASPLD (ASP.NET Link Directory) and my vision was to grow it to become a direct .NET competitor to PHPLD.  But reality hit me, and I just didn’t have the time to invest in it (Ok, ok I got bored with it) and I got more interested in other things like PPC & Umbraco.

While clearing out my computer today I stumbled on my old project, which I had started to port into using Subsonic a few months back…  So with my new love of Umbraco in mind, I thought instead of laying it to rest in the ‘Bin De Recycle Of Never Return’ I would turn it into a simplified Umbraco Package for people to use and hopefully adapt and make better then I ever could.  Well I’m half a day in and I’m amazed how much I have done in that short amount of time, the only stumbled block (Well not so much of a stumbling block) is having lots of nested nodes - due to the amount of categories and businesses people could potentially add.

Anyway, I thought I would show a couple of progress screenshots – And just say to everyone, if you have old projects/ideas you started and never finished (I have loads)… Pull the gloves back on, dust off the project folder and have a whirl at porting into Umbraco.  Even if you scale it down to begin with like I have, at least its a start and maybe something useful can come of that thought to be dead idea. More...

This post really is a beginners guide to Umbraco, I decided to put it together because when I first started messing around with Umbraco I had more than a few issues trying to get it installed due to not being able to find the right answers about a year or so ago (Or was it I was just being impatient) – And I’ll hold  my hands up, I threw my toys out the pram and just gave up… Now I REALLY kick myself and WISH I had carried on.

There has also been some great movements in pushing Umbraco to the next level and making it easier than ever to use. Now I’m no professional or avid blogger, so don’t expect miracles… this is sort of a guide/my own learning journey over the past 4 months all thrown together in one post.  My only aim for this post is to try and give anyone looking to get into Umbraco and real life example and reference from someone doing the same thing.

So What Is Umbraco?

Well here is what's written on the CodePlex Site..

“For the first time on the Microsoft platform a free user and developer friendly cms (Content Management System) that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco got award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls out of the box. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too. Used by more than 57.000 active websites including Heinz.com, Peugeot.com, NAIAS.com and Microsoft's documentinteropinitiative.org website you can be sure that the technology is proven, stable and scales.”

And here is what Umbraco say themselves..

“Who would believe that there would be an open source CMS based on Microsoft's ASP.NET? A CMS that can support any modern browser and that even allows editing with Microsoft Word. One where designers can create accessible and valid xhtml with their mark-up left intact. Where developers can integrate any .net based control right out of the box. If someone tells you "won’t happen", then they have never used umbraco...”

But even more convincing is a great video by the creators themselves :)

http://umbraco.org/documentation/videos/getting-started/what-is-umbraco More...

Following on from my other post about URL Tips for asp.net websites, here is another good little ISAPI rule which I got from Receptional.

I used to set up the non www. domain to 301 redirect via IIS which is a pain as you then have two unnecessary entries.  This solves the problem :)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.yourdomainname\.co\.uk)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomainname.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L,CL]

I’ll keep trying to add ISAPI nuggets as and when I find them, mainly for my own future reference.

I know I am probably about a year too late, but I have just stumbled on http://stackoverflow.com

Man what a totally amazing site!!  I asked a (Really dumb) question that I have wanted to know the answer to for a while and 58 seconds later I got two excellent answers – I’m just amazed I have only just found this.

If like me you struggle to get your head round some of the more advanced ASP.NET stuff you see people like Haack and Mr Gu doing then just ask on http://stackoverflow.com!!  Excellent resource and a really well written site, some very clever features and I think very clever algorithms for matching questions.

I have been building our new content management system, and I knew that our first site to be using it would need have a lot of pages 301 redirected as we are going to change the file structure and pages names (And the old site has has a lot of SEO done).  So I thought it would be a great ‘Admin Tool’ to be able to add the old and new pages into a table and if a 404 was served (One of the old pages) check against the pages in the database and 301 redirect the page to the new one.

So I made a simple table which held the OldURL & NewURL More...

If you are building a new ASP.NET application, SEO has become a big factor in how you plan the structure / code of the site.  But quite an important part of the site which are often overlooked are the URL’s, and a lot of people do the basics which I’ll show below but there are a few common things people tend to miss or never thought could be a problem. I use ISAPI rewrite for most of my sites, which is an amazingly effective tool for sorting duplicate content and SEO issues which I’ll show below

1.) Rewrite your URL’s to be useful / descriptive and stick away from using the old dynamic way

i.e. mypage.aspx?e=54&b=99

Google even tell you this is not ideal in the webmaster guidelines (See bottom of Design & Content Guidelines section) - http://www.google.co.uk/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hlrm=en_uk More...