Blog Posts

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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Tomorrow I will be speaking at Great Lakes Area .Net User Group in Southfield, MI, other wise known as GANG or MIGANG. I'm excited because GANG is one of longest running .Net focused user groups in all of Michigan and pulls in quite the audience from the Detroit area.

I'll once again be talking on how to Optimize Azure App Services. I like this talk because I firmly beleive that Azure App Services are the best possible way to host .Net framework and .Net Core sites. I can say that because we use it all the time to host our Kentico EMS and Kentico Kontent sites. I've also given this talk a few times this year, and feel the deep dive through the Azure App Service general and platform settings is totally worth listening to.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver walks through how to enable Hot Reloading of your .Net Core MVC site that is based on the fantastic Kentico Kontent MVC Boilerplate. The good news is that the Boilerplate and Hot Reloading concept are updated for .Net Core 3.0 and ready for primetime. A big shout out to Rick Strahl, as his .Net Core middleware package is what makes this all possible.

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When troubleshooting an issue, do you ever have that feeling of, "well...this should just work, it always just works..." ? Yeah, I get that a lot. In fact, today's quick tip on Kentico MVC gave me this feeling at least 3 times during a project I was recently on. I was tasked with figuring out why page content in our upgraded Kentico EMS 12.0 site was not publishing automatically when the publish from date was set in the future and that time had passed.

The thing is, the ability to have content scheduled to be published in the future has been in the Kentico platform for ages. I'd guess it was probably there all the way back in version 4 or version 5 of the CMS (maybe even earlier). The feature hasn't really changed in any version I can remember. It should. just. work. I didn't think it had anything to do with MVC vs. Portal engine either, because this feature is only really part of the Kentico Administration tool, and not the MVC live site. My head immediately went to the fact it could be a caching issue (it's almost always a caching issue right?), or server side time zone issue, or heck, in the US we just went through the daylight savings time zone change, maybe it was that. But I was wrong on all accounts.  

Keep reading after the jump to see the problem illustrated and find out how to ensure your content will be published correctly when set to publish in the future.

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In this episode our host Brian McKeiver is joined by Michael Kinkaid, CTO of Reason One and Kentico MVP. Brian and Michael recap what just happened in Denver at Kentico Connection 2019. They cover day 1 and day 2 highlights, how the round table and panel conversations went, the fantastic venue of the event, and wrap up with the most important takeaways of the event.

Spoiler alert: It was a pretty amazing event as always. Keep reading to either watch or listen to the lastest episode of the Kentico Rocks podcast.

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Episode 24 of Kentico Rocks features special guests Kyle Mathews, Founder/CEO of Gatsby and the Gatsby open source project, and Ilesh Mistry, Kentico Architect at MMT Digital. I'm very grateful that both Kyle and Ilesh were able to join me to discuss Gatsby, as I am a huge fan of the technology and think that Gatsby and JAMStack in general are the future of where web development is going (especially when you throw in Kentico Kontent to connect your static site to become fully editable). That's why I even presented on it this year at the Detroit Tech Watch.

Our goal for this episode was to let developers out there know why the combination of Kentico Kontent and Gatsby together is such a killer combination (spoiler alert, the performance is amazing). We even talked about a few specific plugins and starter templates to get you started. Listen to the lastest episode after the jump.

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In little less than a week from now, October 2nd-4th, Kentico developers, partners, employees, and customers will make the annual pilgrimage the largest Kentico event of the year, Kentico Connection. This year the event is located Denver, CO (again). I'm happy to announce that this will be the 8th time that I am speaking at the conference.

There are a ton of new topics this year, like the re-brand of Kentico Cloud to Kentico Kontent, .Net Standard support in Kentico EMS (and eventually .Net Core), and the rise of #KenticoPhoenix. If you are at all interested in attending Connection to hear about topics like these, I couldn't recommend it more. In fact I recently recorded a podcast episode on why Kentico Connections rocks.

This time I will be giving a session titled the "Best of Both Worlds". That's a pretty brave statement in the context of both Business and Technical worlds. What I really mean here is how do we keep digital and marketing teams happy at the same time as technical teams. I hope to communicate why I feel hitting the best of both worlds is possible. Keep reading after the jump for the full abstract of my session.

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