Jan 26, 2020

20 Things Developers Should Know about Kentico 2020

I actually can't believe how fast the new year came upon us, but here we are in January 2020. A new year means that a new version of Kentico is around the corner, and I feel this time around the release situation is a little different. You see I have been using Kentico for over 10 years now, and I can remember some special releases. Version 5.5 R2, version 8, and version 10 are right up there in terms of examples of drastic new releases for the best .Net CMS on the planet. They each had major differences over past versions (just think of how CMSDesk and CMSSiteManager merged into the new clean single Admin tool in version 8). But in my opinion, no past version or past major release can hold a candle to the upcoming release of Kentico 13, aptly code named Kentico 2020 or Kentico Phoenix.

Nov 10, 2019

Kentico MVC Quick Tip - Fix Scheduled Content

When troubleshooting an issue, do you ever have that feeling of, "well...this should just work, it always just works..." ? Yeah, I get that a lot. In fact, today's quick tip on Kentico MVC gave me this feeling at least 3 times during a project I was recently on. I was tasked with figuring out why page content in our upgraded Kentico EMS 12.0 site was not publishing automatically when the publish from date was set in the future and that time had passed.

Feb 24, 2019

Why a Kentico MVC Upgrade Should Not be One Hour of Work

Recently, I have been involved in multiple Kentico MVC Upgrades and Hotfixes for versions 10, 11, and 12 of Kentico. Some have went really well, and some have went not so well.  This hasn't really surprised me as, this is typical of any complex software upgrade. Raise your hand if you have even seen a Visual Studio or MS Office installation completely crap out due to user permissions, mis-matched .Net framework components, or even in the old days dll hell. Yep, I've been there too.   But here's the deal, sometimes customers, and even developers, expect an upgrade to hit all three points on the magic business triangle of the speed: fast, the cost: cheap, and quality: good. Over the many years of working with Kentico and end clients, I have been told by Digital Marketers, IT Directors, and CEO's that why can't this upgrade "just" be finished tomorrow? Why is it so hard? Can't it "just" be done in an hour or two?  

Feb 24, 2019

Why a Kentico MVC Upgrade Should Not be One Hour of Work - Part 2

In the second part of the series, I am going to continue on with the reasons why Kentico Upgrades take what they take and answer the $64,000 question as to what should an upgrade take for a Kentico MVC Site. Be sure to read part one first of the this two part mini blog post series about Why a Kentico MVC Upgrade Should Not be One Hour before continuing on.

Dec 28, 2018

How to Create an XML Sitemap in Kentico 12 MVC

Wow, it is nearly the end of 2018 already. It is amazing that the older I get, time seems to move faster and faster. I can't believe how fast the time has went this year. In fact, time has went by so fast that I didn’t really have time to join in on the buzz of the Kentico 12.0 release that happened last month (well other than having some fun on Twitter celebrating the launch of Raptor).

Nov 18, 2018

How to Configure Kentico MVC Sites for Azure Blob Storage with Media Libraries

In this How To guide, I will show you how to connect your Kentico MVC site to leverage Azure Blob storage for hosting and providing media library files. This process is not exactly new, it has been around since Kentico 8.0 or so, however, with the new focus on the MVC development methodology, it is not exactly as straight forward as the Kentico documentation mentions. Don't get me wrong, each small part of the Kentico documentation is 100% correct, but there is no great 100% holistic walkthrough for MVC based sites.

Apr 20, 2016

Application Insights for Kentico

At the recent Build 2016 conference Microsoft really wowed developers with all sorts of new bells and whistles for Visual Studio, Azure, Bots, and Windows 10.  Included in some of the new enhancements for ASP.Net and Visual Studio was a pretty cool new feature called Visual Studio Application Insights. According to Microsoft, Application Insights allow developers to detect issues, solve problems and continuously improve their applications. The technology is intended to help quickly diagnose any problems in a live application.

Feb 09, 2014

Kentico CMS Quick Tip: Scheduled Task Execution Troubleshooting

My goal of this Quick Tip is to help any Kentico developer out there who may run into a situation where neither the built-in Scheduled Tasks nor custom Scheduled Tasks are executing either manually or automatically. I actually ran into this situation twice in the last two weeks on projects that we are working on with Kentico CMS 7.0 at BizStream.

Jul 21, 2010

9 Reasons Why Your Company Needs a Wiki

I’m a huge fan of using a wiki to help organize our business and it’s various functions, such as creating software. In fact I usually end of recommending the use of a wiki to almost all my clients who do not already have one.