Blog Posts

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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I'm speaking again next week, September 13, 2019. This time I will be giving a session at Prairie.Code() 2019 in Des Moines, IA. This is another conference I have not been to before, but it is part of the highly regarded Amegala tech conference series. I have personally heard many good things about these conferences and how good of a job Amegala does in organizing them. 

I am presenting on improving some soft skills that all developers our there can benefit from with my favorite presentation of the year "How to Win Friends and Influence...Better Developer Estimates". I have given this talk a few times now, and the feedback and particiation from the audiences at THAT Conference and Code PaLOUsa have been amazing. As a result, I'm excited to be off and traveling to lovely Iowa to talk about developer estimates.

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Today I have a quick update for Kentico developers out there on my KenticoCacheDoctor project. In case you are not famliar with it, KenticoCacheDoctor is my mini open source project for working with Kentico 12.0 and Caching. I'm happy to announce that version 2.0 has been released as an updated NuGet package. A HUGE thank you goes out to Sean G. Wright for his contribution to the project, as this whole update was created by him. 

Not only did Sean clean up some of my lazy coding, he also created an integration into Kentico.Glimpse for KenticoCacheDoctor. That's right, now you can install a slightly different new NuGet package and the information that KenticoCacheDoctor provides is shown as a custom tab in Glimpse, just like the Kentico.SQL tab is shown for debugging Kentico SQL statements.

Keep reading after the jump to see this new integration.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks I highlight the biggest event of the year in the Kentico world, Kentico Connections. If you are not sure if the Connections event is right for you, not sure on what will be covered at the event, or are on the fence about attending, than this episode is just for you. I also go into a few details about the Kentico EMS Product roadmap, what's coming up for Kentico 2020, and a shout out to MK's Ketchup. 

Lastly, I cover the Kentico Parter Summit agenda at a high level. So if you are a Kentico Partner or Kentico focused business the second half of the episode is a must listen.

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