When I launched goondocks.com over a year ago I never planned on blogging about Sitefinity or getting a job with Telerik.  In fact, all I really wanted to do was write obscure articles and amuse myself.  But I kept getting more & more involved in the Sitefinity community.  I didn't have anywhere else to publish my articles, so I just kept tossing them on goondocks.com.  Each time I did this I thought I should get a new domain name for this, but I kept putting it off. I'm ... more

Sitefinity comes with several useful modules you can use within your web site.  However, you might wish these modules contained extra options or worked slightly differently. For example, I might use the Sitefinity Events module to schedule group hiking events, but I would also like to enter trail difficulty, group size and and a link to a trail map. Luckily, many Sitefinity modules inherit from a common Generic Content Module base class.  Generic Content Modules can be extended by adding new custom meta-fields.  This makes it easy for us ... more

This web site is now upgraded to Sitefinity 3.5 SP 1.  Compared to the issues I had upgrading to 3.2, this was a relatively easy upgrade process.  I did hit a few minor snags along the way though: Single Assembly for new ASP.NET AJAX Controls Sitefinity now includes the latest version of the ASP.NET AJAX RadControls.  Previously, each of these controls had its own assembly (DLL).  With the latest release, all of these assemblies have been combined into a single assembly (Telerik.Web.UI).  This is a great ... more

PDC has now come & gone and there were several interesting announcements from the conference.   However, in the short-term, I’m not sure life will be very different for many developers.  In the next few years, however, I expect cloud computing will yield some interesting opportunities. One of the most valuable parts of the conference was simply being able to talk to many developers about Sitefinity.  I’m very anxious to get feedback and understand what features would be most useful to developers.  Here are some of the frequently asked questions ... more

Last evening, Microsoft reserved all of Universal Studios Hollywood for attendees of PDC.  (This is one of the reasons the price for PDC registration is more than $2000). Imagine for a moment the demographics at Universal Studios on any given night.  Let’s assume 50% men and 50% women.  Now imagine the demographics at a Microsoft Professional Developers conference.  Based on my VERY informal study, I’m guessing it is 80% men and 20% women. And these aren’t regular people.  Rather these are emotionally detached analytical programmers. Halloween is in 2 days ... more

There is a lot being presented at the PDC.  Here is a quick overview of some of the highlights we’ve seen so far. Windows Azure (Windows in the Cloud) – this is the name being given to Microsoft’s cloud services offering.  This technology will make it possible to deploy your projects onto Microsoft managed data services.  You’ll then be able to virtually & infinitely scale your applications.  It looked really interesting and I’m anxious to test it, but no information on pricing was given.  Time will tell if hosting providers ... more

In a few hours I’m getting on a plane to attend Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.  Last week I attended DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria.  In the coming months I’ll also be attending DevConnections in Las Vegas and then the IMS Show in London.  Prior to joining Telerik I worked as a programmer for 10 years.  I’ve worked for big companies & small companies.  My roles have ranged from programmer to project manager.  In all that time I only attended 3 conferences.  This recent flurry of conference attendance is ... more

So you decided to get a Vonage V-Phone and you’re using Vista… Friend you are now in an unholy land. Before you get started, read Vonage’s official article on using the V-Phone with Vista. If you’re lucky, these instructions will work perfectly. If not, follow… …but follow only if ye be men of valor! For the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so fowl, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived. Bones of four fifty men lie strewn about its lair! So, ... more

I’m now working as a Developer Evangelist at Telerik; my first day was this past Monday.  In this role I will be focusing on Sitefinity & Sharepoint.  Those of you who’ve read a couple of my past Sitefinity articles are probably now thinking “Huh?”  Seth summed this up perfectly in his comment: Oh gees... the world has turned upside down... Gabe Sumner one of the most vocal Sitefinity users (and in past times scathingly so Gabe! :-) is working as a Developer Evangelist. My reply to this comment was ... more

Inside the "Properties" of each Sitefinity page there is an option for enabling "Page Caching". Setting this option to "Yes" will make a dramatic difference in performance. In fact, unless you have a strong reason for not doing so, you should enable page caching on all of your Sitefinity pages. Web pages served from cache do not require expensive database interactions or code processing. Everything is pre-fetched & pre-rendered. The web page will load almost instantly. If you need information about enabling, configuring or using caching in Sitefinity, please visit ... more