Stop Creating New Windows & Tabs When Debugging

By default, Visual Studio launches web applications in a new browser window when debugging. It also closes your browser window when you stop. While I prefer publishing my web applications locally, Optimizely runs well from Visual Studio, and it's easier to debug initialization modules and other items this way. However, when you want to leave the page or content open, this behaviour can get in the way. This is how you change that.

ContentArea with Groups of Personalized Content

Personalization is a powerful component in Episerver that can provide a cool, fresh, and tailored experience for users that visit your site. Leveraging different criteria and conditions in Epi, Visitor Groups provide a grouping mechanism for users to be served different content based on pages they've viewed, forms they've submitted, or campaigns they have arrived from, among various other criteria. It's a pretty nice piece of functionality that, if you haven't learned about yet, you should check out more about, here.

That said, Personalized Groups in Episerver serve content on a prioritized, top-down, first-match basis. That means a visitor is served the first matching content item that is tagged with a visitor group they're in. That also means you are limited to one piece of changing content per Personalized Group for a user. But I needed more, and here are the solutions I explored.

Multiple Image Support in PropertyList

While working on a past project with heavy use of IList<T> properties I ran into several usability situations. One of those situations involved read-only values that were being imported from an external system. They needed to appear in the CollectionEditor, but did not need to be editable (read about that here). Another scenario I encountered involved images in the CollectionEditor. It started off with a simple implementation of the solution provided by Grzegorz Wiecheć, but evolved into something more.

One of the challenges we faced was the customer's need for multiple images in the list, and those images not always sharing the same property name. As with the issue around default values, some of the data for this was being synchronized with an external system, so we needed to be flexible with the property names and the number of image properties that might be present in the list.

DefaultValue in PropertyList

When Episerver brought out PropertyList support in 9.0 and showed the world how to utilize it (read the article here) it rocked the Episerver developer community and changed the way we utilize the CMS to this day! Okay, that's obviously an exaggeration, but it did introduce a different property type to the community, and brought about a different way of supporting lists or collections of data, that didn't require a bunch of blocks added to a ContentArea.

As interesting as it is, however, there are some shortcomings to this functionality. After all, it's mentioned in the linked article that it is a "pre-release API that is UNSTABLE." It's expected to have some quirks and shortcomings. Thankfully, as has already been demonstrated by Grzegorz, in his PropertyList with Images article, the PropertyList, or more importantly the CollectionEditor, can be extended to modify the functionality to fit different needs.

In this article I am taking a similar approach to Grzegorz to extend the functionality, but instead of supporting images in the list, I needed to support a default value specified through code.

Good products don't save bad service: From building a house to building a website

Last night I was sitting around a small bond fire with some friends chatting about our houses. We just moved into our house last October, after having it newly constructed in this new neighborhood. My friends moved in several months prior to us, and watched the construction of our house, which seemed like it was never going to end. We had the same builder, who provides a 1 year touch-up service as part of their warranty to address any "settling", or shrinkage, and my friends just completed their 1 year follow-up.

The difficulties we both had during construction, and post-closing, were the topic of conversation when one of them asked, "would you build another house with them?" I thought about the question for a minute, because the quality of the house and the layout is something we all agreed was above average. But I replied with, "No, I don't think so. A good product won't save bad service."

After the fire I went home, and the similarities between the construction process of our house, and what customers, developers, and agencies go through for websites prompted me to write this. This is my list of issues you might face, along with some pointers for you when starting a new project, or a new relationship with a customer.