Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Check out this years Umbraco Christmas Calendar at http://www.umbraco.org

 

I recently was talking with some friends all of whom were iPhone users.  Someone asked me "Can you build an iPhone app?"  After a little thought I said "I don't see why not".

Now to give you some background I am a web developer, and have primarily been focused on building websites using the Umbraco CMS.   The language that I use everyday is C# and I work on a PC.  This was the first issue, and straight away I could see that this was going to be somewhat of an expensive mission as iPhone apps can only be compiled and deployed on Apple gear.  I'm probably going to get someone tell me that I am wrong about this and that you can build iPhone apps on a PC but I wanted to do this the correct way.

Thankfully I was in the market for a new personal home machine as our equipment at home was beginning to get a little tired.  I settled on a MacBook Pro 15" 2.8 with 500GB HD and 4GB of ram.  It was a good balance of power for dollars especially since apple had dropped the price on their equipment significantly in the past couple of weeks.  The MacBook arrived and I went about downloading the iPhone SDK from the apple developers site.  You can get this for free but they suggest that you sign up to the iPhone Developers Program as this will give you access to more help and a clear deployment pathway at a cost of $99USD.  I haven't done this step yet as I still have a few things to sort out.

Ok… according to Apple I have everything that I need to build an App.  Problem.   I don't know Objective-C which iPhone apps are written in.  Solution, MonoTouch.  This is a project developed by Novell and runs on the MonoDevelop environment.   MonoTouch is an iPhone SDK for C# developers.  Perfect, but it has a price tag of $399USD.  I've decided that this is the price I have to pay as I don't really have the time to learn a new language, and I want to get up and running as quick as I possibly can so I will be shelling out for this shortly.

Anyway this is currently where I am up to.  I have a number of different ideas for what I can deploy as my first app and one of those that I think will be useful I will blog about next time when I will talk through the design process and how I am going about planning this thing.  Hint.  Its going to have something to do with Umbraco :)

Not many Umbraco users or developers know about this feature even though they have used it in their pitch material and have sold it to clients as a feature.

Umbraco has the ability to interface with Microsoft Word or liveWriter via a set of popular blogging APIs.  This is a feature that we teach developers how to use on the Level 1 Umbraco training course.  It allows you the ability to hookup 3 fields (Description, Category, Excerpt) to Umbraco fields.  For example you could manage your News, Blog, or any other simple repeated content.

Check out Content Channels in the Users section of the back office sometime and try hook it up yourself.

BTW this post was posted from liveWriter :)

Over the past few months we have been super busy at Little Web Empire and thought that it was high time that we told people what we have been up to.

Firstly the Umbraco Worldwide Training week back in October was a major success with courses being run around the world in five cities (Copenhagen, London, Seattle, Auckland and Sydney).  Little Web Empire held the courses in both Auckland and Sydney seeing many new developers added to the Umbraco Certified Professionals list.  We also saw Terabyte Interactive (Auckland) and Next Digital (Melbourne) attain Umbraco Solutions Provider status.

Site releases.

Around the busy training schedule we also released three new Umbraco based sites.

Collective Edition www.collectiveedition.com

Nuts About New Zealand www.nutsaboutnz.co.nz

Minti Clothing Store store.iloveminti.com

What's coming up?

We are busy finalising the details for the next round of Umbraco training in Australia and should be able to announce something regarding this shortly.  The interest in the courses has been massive.  We look forward to being able to provide a complete schedule for 2010 sometime soon and

I thought that I should put a post up on the site around ie6 compatibility and my blog.

When I first developed the site I said "I'm not going to care about ie6".   That's all well and good but I am one of those developers that out of curiosity goes and loads the site up in ie6 to see what it looks like.   All I can say is "FAIL".

In New Zealand where I live probably 25% of the corporate market is still using ie6 and so far around 10% of my visitors are getting the "ie6 FAIL" experience.

With this in mind I have decided that I am going to commit a small amount of time to try and reign in some of the major issues with ie6.  I'm not promising that it will look the same as in the modern browsers but at least fix some of the major layout issues.

I wrote this a few weeks back for an email that went out to the Asia Pac Umbraco newsletter subscribers about the benefits of becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional but I thought that I would share it here also.

This is what I wrote:

"There are many benefits for both the developer and their employer when becoming fully Umbraco Certified Professionals.  With Umbraco fast becoming one of the leading open source .net CMS worldwide, being an Umbraco certified developer is a great barter card for any developer when seeking work, both as an employee or as a contractor. For the employer and certainly their sales team, being able to tell clients the team are certified gives both credibility and assurance.  If four or more employees within an organisation are certified, they then become an Umbraco Certified Solutions Provider, gaining a profile on the Umbraco website and exposure to many of potential customers."

I became an Umbraco Certified Professional approximately 2.5 years ago in Melbourne Australia when Niels Hartvig came and ran a Level 2 course.  The course was a complete sell out with people travelling from as far away as China to attend. At that stage the only way you could gain certification was to travel to Denmark, so when the opportunity arose anyone who was using Umbraco seriously jumped at it.

Since then I have been full time developing with Umbraco.  Certification gave me a kick start into knowing the system well and having the confidence to attack projects.  At that stage in my career I was also heavily involved in the sales process.  Certification was something that the larger corporate clients appreciated.  It gave them both the confidence that they were using someone who knew what they were doing, and also that they were buying into a system that had a community of developers prepared to invest in a product through a certification program.

Umbraco has grown exponentially (in terms of installs) since then and is now the top download from the Microsoft Web Platform installer in the CMS category. Clients are now aware of Umbraco and now more than ever are looking for Umbraco Certified Professionals and Certified Solutions Providers to help them through the development process.

I now offer training for developers, leading them through the Level 1 training course and equipping them with the knowledge they need to pass their Level 1 Certification test on completion.

I fully encourage anyone interested in getting their certification to do it. If you are interested in becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional check out the training page for more details.

I've been running Windows 7 for approximately 2 weeks now.  I really like it.  But one thing that i did notice is that when debugging out of Visual Studio (F5) and using Firefox as the browser that it was very slow to serve.  Mind numbingly slow.

Murray Roke put me onto this article that explains that IPV6 support in Firefox effects the speed of connection to Cassini for some reason. Turning off IPV6 support in Firefox is easy.

• In the address bar type 'about:config'
• Filter by 'v6'
• Disable ipv6 support.

Hope that tidbit helps.

Last night while I was frantically getting the training registration system running I ran into an issue that I had never come across before.  This website has a simple shopping cart that relies on session state variables to maintain the cart content.

All was working fine in the development environment (VS2008 Casinni, Windows 7 IIS7) and I was happy with how it was working.  So I decided to deploy to my live server.  All looked good until I tired to view the cart. BAM!!!  big YSOD.

Session state can only be used when enableSessionState is set to true,
either in a configuration file or in the Page directive. Please also
make sure that System.Web.SessionStateModule or a custom session state
module is included in the <configuration>\<system.web>\<httpModules>
section in the application configuration.

I went and checked the web config and everything looked in order.  I had the necessary attributes on the <pages> tag of enableSessionState="true" etc but still no luck.   After trawling the internet for about 2 hours and trying many different suggestions my web.config was starting to look nasty and then I stumbled across an old blog entry on the Umbraco site that discussed migrating to ASP.NET 3.5 and II7

Apparently my issue is to do with extensionless URLs and IIS 7.  For some reason with extensionless URLs the Session State does not get initialized.  To ensure that the Session State is initialized everytime you need to add runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True" to the modules tag in the system.webServer section of the web.config II7.  it should look like this.

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True">

And voila!  Session State works again.

We received a lot of interest from Australia and are please to confirm that we will be running Level 1 training in Sydney Australia on the 22nd and 23rd of October.

The venue is still to be confirmed but that should be sorted by the end of the week.

For more information and registration please visit the training page.

I'm looking forward to meeting all my fellow Umbracoians in Australia.

Announcing Umbraco Level 1 Certification will be running in Auckland on the 19th & 20th of October 2009.

Finally we are able to offer the same Level 1 course as taught by Niels Hartvig (Umbraco Founder) to Australasian Umbraco Developers who wish to become Certified Umbraco Professionals.

This course is aimed at developers/html developers who are new to Umbraco or to those developers who want to formalise their knowledge in the form of certification. For full details of what is covered go to the training page.

Spaces for this course are limited so get in early and reserve your space.  click here to register now.

We will also be running a course in Sydney Australia but I'm still firming up the details for this.  On that note If you have space in Sydney and are interested in hosting the training session please contact me at peter@littlewebempire.com

Update:  I can now confirm Sydney Australia for October 22nd and 23rd.  Check out the blog post.