Blog Posts

It's May, and the means that many things in the US. People are looking forward to Memorial day, the opening of summer, the welcoming of warm weather, the end of the stay at home orders (unless you are in Michigan), and plenty more. However, it also means that the biggest event of the year is here if you are a .Net developer, that's right the annual Microsoft Build conference.

MS Build 2020 happened last week, with a new virtual only format, and with tons of new announcements as it always does. For .Net developers who weren't paying attention the biggest announcements being Blazor WebAssembly has officially made it to its first production release, Azure Static Web Apps preview, .Net 5 preview 4 is out, the unveiling of .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI), C# 9.0, Windows Forms Designer for .Net Core, a Microsoft Bot Framework update, and updates to our favorite developer tools like Visual Studio and Code. Honesty, there is a ton more as well. 

With the announcement of so many cool .Net things, it got me thinking, how could Kentico Kontent developers take advantage of these new things, and also what else is new or updated in the Kontent world for .Net projects and solutions. The rest of this post is where I will cover that very thing, plus mention how we might be able to take advantage of the latest and greatest from MS Build 2020 as well.

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Kentico 12.0 (and really Kentico 12.0 Service Pack 1) has brought many welcome enhancements to the Kentico platform when it comes to the ASP.Net MVC development style. But the one true killer feature when it comes to MVC is the Kentico MVC Page Builder. The drag and drop Page Builder allows content editors to create content and control page layout very easily. Combine that with the ability to create MVC page templates, easy to use A/B tests, and easy to use Personalization variations, and you don't have much excuse not to use it in Kentico 12.

Even though this feature is pretty new, time has moved on since last summer, when service pack 1 was officially released. That means developers have most likely had enough time to enjoy the pleasure of working with the system, as well as the pain of dealing with the system when it doesn't quite behave as designed. I know personally I have lost more than just an hour or two to a weird random JavaScript error that kept the Page Builder from loading, or some weird Content Security Policy error that prevented the Preview mode from even loading the Page Builder. The list goes on from there.

I have also seen the beauty of the system working in advanced ways, such as MVC Page Builder widgets being crafted out of ReactJS that makes front end developers happy or MVC widgets that pull from structured data in the Content Tree to allow for full content reusability and flexibility, and my end clients raving about how easy it is to build landing pages out of the Page Builder. This list goes on too.

Since the feature has been out for a bit now (and matured quite nicely), and I have seen the good and the bad, I felt it time to create a list of what I will call the Do's and Don'ts of Kentico MVC Page Builder to help other Kentico developers and Kentico partners out there get the most out of the system.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver talks about Kentico Kontent's API capabilities. The goal is to talk about a lesser publicized Kontent API, the Management API. Brian discusses why you might want to use the Management API for importing content, reviews how to call the Management API v1 from the .Net SDK that Kontent provides, and demo's a real world Blazor app that upserts content items through the Management API v2.

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If you have been listening to some of my recent podcast episodes, you have been hearing how I have been excited for a bit now about the Kentico 13 Beta 2 release and how it sets up Kentico EMS for the future. You may also have heard me talk about the future of .Net and why it matters to the .Net development community and why .Net Core is better than ASP.Net MVC 5 on the full .Net 4.x Framework.

Well I decided to put my money where my mouth is over the weekend. I was inspired to give the absolute latest bleeding edge scenario of .Net technology a try with the Kentico 13 Beta. I wanted to download Kentico Phoenix, install a clean version of it, and attempt to run .Net 5 Preview 1 as my front end MVC live site connected to Kentico. That's right, to hell with the 18-year-old full .Net Framework. Sorry young .Net Core 3.1, I am even skipping right past you too. I'll take the 6-day old version of .Net 5 (the successor to both). 

Or, as I aptly have termed this scenario, let’s create a Double Phoenix. Get it? .Net 5 is .Net Core reborn just like Kentico 13... Yeah, I know it's cheesy, but it’s a catchy hashtag for sure #DoublePhoenix.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver interviews Ondrej Polesny, Kentico Kontent developer evangelist, and Michal Vanzura, lead QA engineer on Kentico EMS. Brian, Ondrej, and Michal discuss the value of unit testing for software developers, what's the difference between unit testing, integration testing, and functional testing, and review a few options for performing JavaScript based testing with Jest and Cypress.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver interviews Ryan Overton Kentico Kontent developer evangelist. Brian and Ryan cover quickly how JAMStack is continuing to gain steam, but spend more time discussing the question of can JAMStack do other things beside just static websites. Brian then demos a GatsbyJS implementation connected to Kentico Kontent that Team BizStream has been working on that is multi-channel.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver interviews Sean G. Wright of Wired Views in the Akron, OH. Brian asks Sean on his development experience and background working with Kentico EMS, why he got started blogging about Kentico, and where does he see the future of Kentico going. They also talk about the recent release of beta 2 for Kentico 2020 and some new Kentico resources on Github. 

Keep reading to listen to the latest episode of the Kentico Rocks podcast after the jump.

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I'm happy to announce that I have been selected to speak at the 15th Annual Orlando Code Camp on March 28th, 2020 at Seminole State College. The code camp is a free, one day learning event for programming professionals and students with a focus on .NET and other related technologies. This year the Orlando Code Camp features 80 Sessions, 600 attendees, and multiple tracks on a diverse range of topics. I am happy to be one of the speakers once again (this will be my second time speaking at OCC).

My session for this conference, "Feature Flag Football with Azure App Configuration", has me excited because I think the new .Net Core Feature Management libraries are pretty useful as I had the chance to recently use them in a real world application. Keep reading after the jump to see the full session abstract.

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I actually can't believe how fast the new year came upon us, but here we are in January 2020. A new year means that a new version of Kentico is around the corner, and I feel this time around the release situation is a little different. You see I have been using Kentico for over 10 years now, and I can remember some special releases. Version 5.5 R2, version 8, and version 10 are right up there in terms of examples of drastic new releases for the best .Net CMS on the planet. They each had major differences over past versions (just think of how CMSDesk and CMSSiteManager merged into the new clean single Admin tool in version 8). But in my opinion, no past version or past major release can hold a candle to the upcoming release of Kentico 13, aptly code named Kentico 2020 or Kentico Phoenix.

I say that because there are so many things going on in Kentico 2020 that it is actually hard to keep track. That might be because Kentico has actually had more time than normal for this release, or maybe its because the technology stack in the Microsoft .Net world has had a seismic shift in the last 2 years with the release of .Net Core, or maybe because the people are Kentico are a talented, motivated bunch and want to make sure that Kentico EMS continues to be a market leader. Or maybe it's all three of those factors. 

Either way, I thought since there have been so many announcements and updates along the way, it might be good to summarize the key aspects of the release that developers should be aware of it. So without further ado, keep reading to find out my 20 Things that Developers should know about Kentico 2020. 

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver interviews Dmitry Bastron of the Delete Agency in London, UK. Dmitry's blog is dedicated to Kentico and he is an active member of the Kentico community. Brian asks Dmitry how we got started with Kentico EMS, what are the best parts of the platform in Dmitry's opinion, and why he got started blogging about Kentico.

They also cover a few recent topics around Kentico 2020, Kentico MVC awesomeness, and get into the pros and cons of using a built in module like Kentico Event management (hint, you may not want to).  

Keep reading to listen to the latest episode of the Kentico Rocks podcast after the jump.

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