Brian Beckham

YSOD You don’t delete contents of your App_ConfigInclude. You just don’t, right? It’s not something people normally do. Well, I first did and then I forgot that I did while I was playing with cleaning up after TDS’s File Replacement. I then left for the day and the next day my local Sitecore sandbox wouldn’t […]

If you are developing with Sitecore you are probably using TDS. If you are not then you are clearly missing out. You may as well stop reading this post and go check it out first. File Replacement Residue We have posted previously on how to set up your Sitecore solution with TDS and how to […]

In my previous posting Setting Up a Sitecore Solution – Part 1 Visual Studio and Projects, we covered the basics of setting up your development instance to work on a Sitecore project, and we defined an empty “shell” of a solution in Visual Studio. To review, here’s our empty shell of a solution: As you […]

For my fellow Sitecore enthusiasts (and for those that know BrainJocks, because Tommy is relentlessly pestering me to do this), I’d like to share some best practices on properly setting up a solution for Sitecore development. In my opinion, this is one of the most important things that you have to get right when starting […]

In a post about creating editable labels in Sitecore from John West, he points out a technique to allow a developer to use annotations within your MVC model to attach “fields” within the context item that would be used to label form fields. The same technique can be used to power custom validators with editable error […]

Just a quick note – when a project we started required DMS to be used with MVC as the primary rendering engine, one of our devs got stuck for a bit.  It seemed that the rules engine didn’t fire correctly for MVC renderings. On investigation I found 2 things that I wanted to share (as […]

In Sitecore, the MVC framework provides a “default” model type that does some very necessary work. To support the view, Sitecore’s default model type Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingModel provides you access to The “current” item – passed via a datasource or the context item if no datasource is used The PageContext item (which may be different if a […]

Sitecore’s MVC support is (as of Sitecore 6.6 update 5) based on the MVC3 implementation by Microsoft. One really nice feature of Microsoft’s MVC4 implementation is the concept of bundling. Bundling allows a developer to aggregate a collection of either CSS files or Javascript files into a single “item” that can be easily manipulated and […]

Not exactly the most glorious post for the first from our Sitecore blog, but nevertheless, the team asked for it so here it is. There are occasions where a developer needs to create some simple page to run “against” items contained within a Sitecore database.  This can be used to modify items in the content […]