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Etching sketches with a Netduino Go

Netduino Go is designed for much more than toy projects, but one has to recognize that toy projects are fun and also great learning experiences. Today, I want to take you through the process of reprod...

Electronics for developers with Netduino Go

Wouldnt it be great if you could build your own stuff? Microcontrollers let you do that, but they usually require dealing with a lot of complexity and unknowns. If youre a software developer, chances ...

ZenGallery: a minimalist image gallery for Orchard

There are quite a few image gallery modules for Orchard but they were not invented here I wanted something a lot less sophisticated that would be as barebones and minimalist as possible out of the box...

Overriding the Pager rendering in Orchard

The Pager shape that is used in Orchard to render pagination is one of those shapes that are built in code rather than in a Razor template. This can make it a little more confusing to override, but no...

Drawing transparent glyphs on the HTML canvas

The HTML canvas has a set of methods, createImageData and putImageData, that look like they will enable you to draw transparent shapes pixel by pixel. The data structures that you manipulate with thes...

My Orchard comment notification rule

The Rules module in Orchard enable you to set-up if this then that types of rules. The system is fully extensible in terms of what this and that are of course, but Orchard comes with everything you ne...

Leaving the Evil Empire

TL;DR: Im leaving Microsoft to found my own company. My involvement in Orchard continues unchanged. Its been almost nine years. Nine years at Microsoft, first as a developer, and then as a program ma...

More than one driver for a single Orchard part

Drivers in Orchard are responsible for taking content parts and using them to generate shapes for the rendering engine to transform into HTML. A little known fact is that there can be more than one dr...

About Orchard Governance and Microsoft

Back in September, we did something with Orchard that is kind of a big deal: we transferred control over the Orchard project to the community. Most Open Source projects that were initiated by corpora...

Whats the deal with Orchard and NuGet? Does Orchard suck?

Damn, Rob saw right through the PR lies of Phil Haack about the new NuGet gallery and figured it all out. Kidding, kidding. For your enjoyment and context, here is Robs post: http://wekeroad.com/20...

Source-controlled database backups

Im not very satisfied with traditional database backup solutions. It seems like almost no progress was made since SQL Server 6.5 (at least for the built-in tools). They are still outputting monolithic...

State of .NET Image Resizing: how does imageresizer do?

I've written several times before about image resizing in .NET and how the various built-in solutions (GDI, WPF and WIC) compare in terms of quality, speed and size. I'll put the links to my previous ...

So what's new in Orchard 1.3?

Orchard 1.3 was released yesterday night with some really neat features that I will outline in this post. I will come back in depth on some of those with full-length posts. Let's start with the simple...

PIX-6T4, the DIY console, has an Orchard site

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed the electronics posts lately. With my friend Fabien, we've been building a little handheld console from readily available parts. It's al...

Building a simple Fritzing component

This is me shaving a yak. Shaving the yak, if you don't know, is what you do when a seemingly simple task necessitates many recursive and unforeseen sub-tasks in order to be carried out. The story go...

Authoring SVG with a text editor

SVG definitely is an increasingly interesting skill, especially as it's making its way into HTML 5 as an officially allowed grammar inside of HTML documents. Most SVG is authored through some kind of ...

So you don't want to use placement.info?

In Orchard, the UI gets composed from many independent parts. We wrote a lot of code to handle that fact without friction. It is easy to add a new part or remove an existing one without breaking anyth...

Future Orchard Part 3: Autoroute

The way URLs work in Orchard today is fine for the simplest sites but it's not very customizable and comes with a number of challenges. Let's look at how it works today. Let's start with a plain page:...

Future Orchard Part 2: more Tokens

This is part 2 for this post Before I show some more advanced features of Tokens, I should probably say a word about why exactly we think we need this feature. In a CMS, there are many places where y...

Future Orchard Part 1: Introducing Tokens

After a long phase of cleanup on the new Orchard 2.0, we are now busy designing new features. We are focusing on a few foundational pieces, and on enabling e-commerce on top of the platform. In this p...

So what are zones really?

There is a (not so) particular kind of shape in Orchard: zones. Functionally, zones are places where other shapes can render. There are top-level zones, the ones defined on Layout, where widgets typic...

Creating shapes on the fly

Most Orchard shapes get created from part drivers, but they are a lot more versatile than that. They can actually be created from pretty much anywhere, including from templates. One example can be fou...

Adding RSS to tags in Orchard

A year ago, I wrote a scary post about RSS in Orchard. RSS was one of the first features we implemented in our CMS, and it has stood the test of time rather well, but the post was explaining things at...

Orchard list customization: first item template

I got this question more than once: "how can you use a different template for the first blog post?" The scenario is illustrated by this example: If you look at the default rendering for the...

Using Taxonomies in Orchard

In this screencast, I will demonstrate how to use the Taxonomies module in Orchard to create a simple news site. ...

Even better customizability in Orchard

One of our goals in Orchard is to make it possible and simple to change and customize the markup and style for everything that gets rendered by the application and its modules. Of course, this is made...

Recovering the admin password in Orchard

These things happen, and it seems hopeless at first: you've locked yourself out of your own site and that's that. Well, not quite. If you still have access to the database there is a way out. Access m...

Orchard 1.1: what's in it for developers?

My previous post focused on the most visible changes in Orchard 1.1 but we also made a few changes to the platform that open up new developer scenarios. Suppressing Dependencies Orchard is essential...

What's new in Orchard 1.1?

It was only three months ago that we shipped Orchard 1.0 and 1.1 is already here with some substantial improvements and many bug fixes. Let me walk you through the most important ones Admin Redesign...

Deploying an Orchard site using WebMatrix

In this screencast, I'm publishing an Orchard web site and its SQL Express database to a shared host using WebMatrix. ...

Migrating an Orchard site from SqlCe to Sql Express using WebMatrix

In this short video, I show how to use WebMatrix to migrate an Orchard site from using the file-based SqlCe to a SQL Express database. ...

What happens when I request a page in Orchard?

If you look at a typical request for a page, the route will resolve the URL to the Display method of the ItemController in Orchard.Core/Routable/Controllers. That action will retrieve the content item...

Taking over list rendering in Orchard

A task that is likely to pop-up oftentimes when customizing an Orchard theme for a project is list rendering. Two types of shapes will typically be at work when rendering a list in Orchard: the summar...

Dispatching Orchard shapes to arbitrary zones

In my LIDNUG demo last week, I showed an interesting technique that I know some people will want to apply to their own stuff. The scenario is that you want the main content being displayed on the pag...

Driving a LED matrix from a Netduino one more time: The Right Way

In previous posts, we've seen two ways one can drive a small LED matrix from a Netduino. The first time, we just turned the rows and columns of the matrix on and off using digital ports on the Netdui...

My Orchard talk for LIDNUG

I just finished speaking at LIDNUG. You can download the recording here: http://www.lidnug.org/archives.aspx I hope I can make that available for streaming somewhere in the near future or maybe even...

Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a ...

The best way to learn how to extend Orchard

We do have tutorials on the Orchard site, but we can't cover all topics, and recently I've found myself more and more responding to forum questions by pointing people to an existing module that was so...

Storing non-content data in Orchard

A CMS like Orchard is, by definition, designed to store content. What differentiates content from other kinds of data is rather subtle. The way I would describe it is by saying that if you would put e...

Caching items in Orchard

Orchard has its own caching API that while built on top of ASP.NET's caching feature adds a couple of interesting twists. In addition to its usual work, the Orchard cache API must transparently separ...

Building a favicon module for Orchard

I built a little module for Orchard tonight and it involves a couple of interesting magic tricks so I thought I'd share. The module is replacing the default Orchard favicon with whatever you configur...

Creating and maintaining Orchard translations

Many volunteers have already stepped up to provide translations for Orchard. There are many challenges to overcome with translating such a project. Orchard is a very modular CMS, so the translation m...

Orchard shapeshifting

I've shown in a previous post how to make it easier to change the layout template for specific contents or areas. But what if you want to change another shape template for specific pages, for example ...

Mandatory look back at 2010

Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry. First, the mildly depressing: the most popular post on this blog this year with 47,000 hits was a post from last year about a fix to a bug in ASP.NET. A content-...

Migrating a blog from Orchard 0.5 to 0.9

My personal blog still runs on Orchard 0.5, because the theme that I used to build it is not yet available for more recent versions, but it is still very important for me to know that I can migrate al...

Switching the layout in Orchard CMS

The UI composition in Orchard is extremely flexible, thanks in no small part to the usage of dynamic Clay shapes. Every notable UI construct in Orchard is built as a shape that other parts of the syst...

Displaying an image on a LED matrix with a Netduino

In the previous post, weve been flipping bits manually on three ports of the Netduino to simulate the data, clock and latch pins that a shift register expected. We did all that in order to control one...

Doh! Use the right constants when you talk to a Netduino

When programming a Netduino microcontroller, you are going to use constants from the SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware.Netduino namespace. In particular, there are constants defined for each of the microcontr...

FluentPath 1.0

Last Sunday, I published version 1.0 of my little FluentPath library. This library, which is a fluent wrapper around System.IO, started as a little experiment / code sample and has been met with some...

More Netduino fun

Last time, we ran a very simple program on the Netduino. This time around, well actually connect some real hardware to that microcontroller and blink some lights! You know what? Lets go crazy! Lets go...

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