This book takes you from a standing start, building useful web sites using drag-and-drop, to administration details, designer techniques and on to developer coding particulars for complete programmatic control over Sitefinity CMS websites and widgets. Step-by-Step walkthroughs give you practical experience working with Sitefinity along with explanations of the “why” behind each technique.
Using Sitecore MVC for REST Services
Your Sitecore data needs to reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices that only RESTful applications can fulfill. Use Sitecore and MVC to build REST services for providing your customers and users with rich, interactive applications.
Include CSS and JavaScript Resources in Sitefinity MVC Widgets
Today on Sitefinity version 7, there still isn’t a way of adding scripts and styles to MVC widgets, so I have come up with a workaround to do this… better late than never. I consider it a hack because this only works in hybrid mode and assumes the page is a Web Form. I created this as an HTML helper for MVC and can now do this on your views.
Enable SSL in Development with IIS Express
While developing web applications, it is common that you must test the site in SSL mode. Normally, this would be a pain and would require you to set up the site in IIS manually. From then on, you must attach the debugger in Visual Studio to the application pool process. There’s an easier way!
Generic Repository Pattern with Entity Framework and Web API
If you are like any other coder, cutting and pasting snippets should put up a red flag in your mind. You will quickly hit this threshold when creating CRUD-services for MVC 4 applications over and over again. This lead me to create a repository pattern using generic types and base controller classes that I would like to share with you.
Relative paths in MVC Razor
Did you know in Razor markup can auto-resolve paths? Take a look at this gem built into MVC 4.
Using ASP.NET Web API for Sitefinity REST Services
Although you could implement your own RESTful WCF Service in Sitefinity, there is a gem Microsoft dropped into the MVC 4 Beta. I am referring to Web API: a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. ASP.NET Web API is an ideal platform for building RESTful applications on the .NET Framework.”
Convert a C# Object to JavaScript in MVC Razor
Creating a JavaScript application on top of ASP.NET MVC is becoming more common these days. Rightfully so, especially with the new Web API addition to MVC 4. The clear separation between client-side and server-side is an elegant architecture indeed!
Building an HTML5 Mobile App using jQuery Mobile and ASP.NET MVC
The mobile revolution has created a plethora of new platforms and languages. It
is rare to see old technologies successfully reaching new grounds together. A good
example of this is .NET MVC and jQueryMobile. The blends of Razor, HTML, CSS, and jQuery make mobile a very familiar territory, a package that makes things quick, easy, and beautiful!
Get an Absolute URL from a Relative Path in C# .NET
Getting an absolute path from a relative one has been made very easy and pleasant by .NET. Just feed the relative path to the “Page.ResolveUrl” method and that’s it! One thing that was left out by .NET though is how to get an absolute URL from a relative path? With social networks on the rise, passing around your links has become more important than ever. There are many ways to do this, but all have their drawbacks. I will show you a static method that I use that solves just about all cases.
