Blog

Today, I had a little problem after adding some properties to a document type in Umbraco. I've had this problem before and I keep forgetting how to fix it.

When opening a node of this document type (in Umbraco's Content area, not the document type editor), I get the following (rather generic) error:

I must add that while creating some new properties on this document type, the property was added, but I did get and SQL time-out. Not sure why that was, but it must have interupted an update process on existing nodes.

This is probably the reason that the current nodes are now corrupt. As you can see in the exception, there was a problem adding a control to the page.

The solution is easy, you have to publish all of the nodes and its subpages to fix the error. Voliá!

Richard Soeteman adds some extra information on a similar error while deleting a property on a document type. The issues could be related, so if you still have problems, check out his blog post as well.

Wow, who would've thought 10 months ago when I was introduced to Umbraco that I would be nominated to be an MVP? I sure didn't expect that!

I'm not asking for votes, I'm proud to be listed among giants and you can make your own decisions.

However, I would like to promote the others on the list:

Chris Houston was the first one to reply on my first blog post and I love how active and involved he is in the community. I can't wait to see the cmsMailer package that he's involved in. Vote for Chris!

Chris Koiak has made some cool packages and seems to be a great developer with a passion for Umbraco. Besides, he's from Glasgow, he must have a great accent. Vote for Chris (no, not the other one, this one)!

Dan Drayne must have a very high accept rate on our.umbraco, his forum replies are always very helpful. Vote for Dan!

Darren Ferguson's source code makes me jealous! Awesome packages, I have a lot to learn from this guy. Vote for Darren!

Dirk De Grave is always helpful on the forum, always there (does he ever leave his computer?), patient beyond belief even though some people test his patience sometimes. Vote for Dirk!

Douglas Robar really is the best teacher I've ever met. His posts on the forum are long and complete, with amazing attention to detail. Vote for Douglas!

Jan Skovgaard also always seem to be online, helping out, asking questions. Plus he seems to like Dutch people, perfect! Vote for Jan!

Jesper Ordrup seems to be taking Umbraco to new heights with the projects he's involved in. Let's hope he keeps sharing his insights. Vote for Jesper!

Lee Kelleher is a busy bee, he seems to be everywhere at the same time and should be rewarded for all of his efforts in the community. Vote for Lee!

Lee Messenger's ideas to change the our.umbraco forum from "just" questions and answer to even more thought provoking conversations are great, keep up the good work. Vote for Lee (THIS one)!

Morten Bock: uForum, need I say more? Awesome coder. Vote for Morten!

Nik Wahlberg I don't know so well unfortunately, but he must be awesome 'cause he's wearing sunglasses, just like Niels. Vote for Nik!

Peter Dijksterhuis should win because he works on a farm one month a year. Also, he made the great calendar package, good stuff. Vote for Peter!

Petr Snobelt thumbs up for the MemberControls package, and his avatar. Vote for Petr!

Richard Soeteman is the number one Umbraco fanboy from The Netherlands. This guy might be singlehandedly responsible for the rise in popularity of Umbraco in the last year or so.. ;) Vote for Richard!

Ron Brouwer another fellow Dutchie and a very helpful guy, love his work. Vote for Ron!

Thomas Höhler must be the loneliest Umbracian in Germany, but that's great, gives him time to help everybody out on the forum and on Twitter. Also makes cool packages. Vote for Thomas!

Tim Saunders always helpful with a different take things, I love seeing alternate solutions. Vote for Tim!

Warren Buckley well, what's not to love about this guy, CWS is awesome, he's always looking to add value to the community, and it's working. Vote for Warren!

... I really can't choose, I might as well vote for myself now!

Of course, this is all a clever ploy to get everybody to vote for me anyway.. I trust you will all not find me out. ;-)

Rather than making a long post with a lot of images, I decided to do something new for this post: a nice little 6 minute screencast!

It's just a quick run through of how I create a new Umbraco installs on my dev machines. It's easy!

I noticed after the recording that I didn't change the path for the database files. During the creation of the new database, you can easily change the path of where the database files are stored here (buttons marked yellow):

I tend to mumble a little, I'll work on that for future screencasts (also, I didn't shave, sorry). ;-)

Hopefully this will help some people setting up their Umbraco install manually.

If you've been reading my blog, it should be clear by now that I'm a bit of a fan of the Git version control system.

I've been hosting some projects on Unfuddle for a while now, but have not been very happy with fiddling with SSH keys and setting up the central repositories through the Git Extensions for Windows. It works, but that's all I can say.

Another issue I was not looking forward to tackling was setting up TeamCity to pull from Unfuddle. I haven't tried, and for all I know it might work great, but if there's a perfectly good shortcut that I can take, I'll take it!

A few days ago I saw some tweets from people mentioning Git and DropBox as a combo. Unfortunately, I can't find the messages any more as Twitter's retention policy seems to be very aggressive. So I decided to try doing it myself.

The advantages of having a Git repository in DropBox are that:

• it does not rely on a service that (for all I know) might go out of business one day;
• it prevents me from having to create SSH keys as credentials;
• it makes it easier to point TeamCity to a central git repository (which is in fact on the local disk);
• the central repository is always synced to all of my dev machines and to the DropBox server, so there is multiple backups in case of catastrophic failure;
• you will always have the ability to push changes to a central repository, even if you have no (or intermittent) internet connectivity;
• if you have to work without internet connectivity, but with network connectivity, you could just set-up a network share and push and pull to each of the repositories that way.

I'm wildly enthusiastic about the distributed nature of the Git version control system, it really does allow me to work from anywhere and in any way that I want.

Setting up Git with DropBox on Windows

I am assuming that you have DropBox installed and that you are using the Git Extensions that I've mentioned in earlier blog posts on Git.

I've created a folder somewhere in my DropBox folders that will hold my Git repositories. In there, I've created a folder called "Example.git".

Next, I created a new Git repository using the Git Extensions. When you start Git Extensions, choose "Initialize new repository" from the "Commands" menu.

I created a "Central repository, no working dir" in the "Example.git" folder.

Then, in the folder that holds my Example project, I created a personal repository, as I would do normally when putting you project under version control (again through "Commands", "Initialize new repository").

This will open up the repository in Git Extensions. The first thing I like to do is hit the "Edit .gitignore" button, add the default ignores and commit that as the initial commit.

With that inital commit out of the way, I will add a remote from the "Remotes" menu.

I've name the new remote "DropBoxExample" and instead of entering a URL, I point to the "Examples.git" folder that I created earlier.

After clicking the "Save" button, Git Extensions will ask if I want to automatically configure the default push and pull behavior, I've skipped this step because the folder on the disk is not actually a server that understands commands. Then I closed the "Remote repositories" window and start pushing the master branch to the remote.

And got a confirmation message, it worked!

Now I am able to actually set the pull defaults, so I go back to managing the remote, go to the "Default pull behavior" tab to choose the defaults from the dropdown lists and clicked "Save".

All done!

I went to my other machine and created the same "D:\Dev\Example" folder.

I opened up Git extensions and initalized the folder as a personal repository. Then I was able to add the remote repository in exactly the same way, instead of entering a URL, I pointed to the "Example.git" folder in DropBox, saved the remote and pulled from it.

To my delight, I saw the .gitignore file appear immediately and noticed that I had received the commit history from the other machine. Success!

Of course I then proceeded to add a Visual Studio project, pushed it to the central repository, pulled it in on the other machine, and again, everything appeared as I hoped it would. Success!

I'm running a very simple web server for Cultiv and some other projects. It's a virtual server to which I have full remote desktop access. This means that I am the administrator and I decide what goes on at the server, no interference by my hosting provider. But, as always, with great power comes great responsibility…

I believe my hosting provider makes a backup of the whole server every night, and at best, I can have them restore a 1-day old backup. One day of retention is not something that I feel comfortable to rely on, by far!

Recently Jeff Attwood (of Coding Horror and StackOverflow fame) had a big scare and the resulting discussion that followed, lead to a blog post by Joel Spolsky (of FogCreek and StackOverflow fame) pointing out that backing up is not the problem, restoring usually is.

Well, since I had NO backup strategy, whatsoever, I figured it was about time to change that.

My current server specs are: A Windows Server Web - (2008 Hyper-V VPS) with IIS7 and Microsoft SQL Express server. It's that simple!

What to backup?

The question of what to backup seems like a simple one to me:

• my websites (including file/folder permissions);
• the website's MS SQL databases;
• the IIS configuration for the websites;
• the IIS log files, so that I could maybe reconstruct what happened in case of a catastrophe.

How to backup?

Websites and meta content

The websites are all in one folder, so that's easy (I'll talk about the permissions later).

I had to look a little bit to find a way to backup the configuration files, but a post about IIS configuration history was a great resource.

To backup the current IIS configuration, I included the %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\ folder and I love that the configuration changes are being written automatically to the %systemdrive%\inetpub\history directory. That way, I could recover and older configuration if needed, cool!

Finally, I included the %systemdrive%\inetpub\logs file for the sake of it.

SQL Express

At first, I was backing up SQL's ".mdf" and ".ldf" files, which is an utterly stupid idea, as I learned from StackOverflow postcast 78. So I needed a different strategy for that. SQL Express doesn't offer the ability to create automated back-ups, so I had to look for extra software. This was difficult, nothing really did what I wanted it to do: give me a bunch of .bak files. Everything I found was either too fancy or didn't work.

My colleague pointed me in the direction of an article on ServerFault and I was able to construct a decent enough solution out of this.

I took the SQL script in the ServerFault post and modified it a little, now the backup files are zipped using 7zip instead of zip and at maximum compression ratio (7zip can compress text really, really well, so why not). I put it in the folder C:\DatabaseBackup as per the default for the script.

Next, I set up a scheduled task in Windows, to run the script every day. The action is "Start a program", the program/script is "sqlcmd" and the arguments are:
-i C:\DatabaseBackup\backup.sql -o C:\DatabaseBackup\output.txt -S .\SQLEXPRESS
Where .\SQLEXPRESS is the name of my (you guessed it) SQL Express server. You might need to do add some login credentials to these arguments, have a look at the sqlcmd documentation for the details.

Finally, before running the script for the first time, I had to enable the xp_cmdshell option in SQL Express. Make sure to read up on the security implications when you do so.

Now, this will not give you any notifications when the SQL script is unable to backup the databases. On another server, I installed Vale Express Agent to get notifications when the SQL fails. To do this, make sure to paste the SQL directly into a new backup job (don't use sqlcmd to call the script!).

Where and how to backup?

I've been working with Amazon S3 lately and S3 was also mentioned in the podcast that I mentioned earlier. Basically, Amazon makes sure that your data is in at least two locations in the world at all times. Also, S3 is terribly inexpensive, so it seemed like a good idea to backup to their servers.

Enter JungleDisk. I'd heard about JungleDisk before, it can backup all of my data to S3 and it is dirt cheap. It's only $5 a month for a server edition (which runs the backup as a Windows service), this includes the first 10 GB of storage for free! Great deal, as I currently only have a few hunder megabytes to backup anyway.

JungleDisk also natively supports backing up NTFS file permissions, which is exactly what I need.

Setting up was quite easy, however I was suddenly stuck in a "looking for server" screen after entering my JungleDisk credentials. As it turns out, the first time you set up the software, you have to start "Set License Key for Jungle Disk Server Edition" first. After that, it was easy to add the folders I needed and exclude .mdf/.ldf files.

How to restore?

Apparently, this is the most important part of my backup strategy… And I'm being dumb about it, because I haven't tried restoring at all. I mean, yes, I've restored a JungleDisk backup to see if I can get my files back, but that's it.

I am prepared to spend a few hours rebuilding my server if something happens to it. Currently I don't have much data and a simple deployment strategy, so this should not be a big problem.

I'll revisit the restore part once I have to move to a much bigger server, but by then, I'll probably also have to revisit the backup strategy. As I said, it's basic.

10 PRINT "REALLY BASIC"

20 GOTO 10

RUN

Recently, I've been working on a site that presents 30 to a 120 items from Umbraco's media section in the frontend of the website.

In the past few weeks, I've been tweaking the site for performance and noticed that there were an aweful lot of SQL queries being performed in the database. As it turns out, calls to the umbraco.library:GetMedia() method are being sent directly to the database. This meant that for each media item, three queries are being performed. Times a 120... That starts to hurt a little.

Also, it is impossible for us to turn on caching on this macro completely because updating the media item with a new image would not expire the cache.

I had to come up with something else that would cache calls to the media library. So today, I'm presenting you the Cultiv MediaCache package.
This package provides an XSLT extension that provides a caching mechanism for calls to the "GetMedia" method.

It's very easy to use:
In your XSLT files, instead of doing calls to umbraco.library:GetMedia(), you do them to Cultiv.MediaCache:GetMedia().
That's it! Told you it was easy.

Read all about it on the project page, download it, use it, vote it up. Okay, thanks! :-)

Tiny update dec 20, 2009 - 17:28: Now compatible with .net 2.0 installs of Umbraco (previously only worked on .net 3.5).

So now that you've started using Git, you might want to share your repository with your team using a central repository. I'll show an example of how to do that by using a free account at Unfuddle.com.

Sign up for Unfuddle and log in to your account (through your_account_name.unfuddle.com). Go to "Repositories" and create a new Git repository.

Now you have to create an authorization key, to be able to log in to the Git repository remotely.

Go back to Visual Studio and click Git's "Browse repository" (the folder icon) button again. Then in the menu go to "Remotes" > "PuTTY" > "Generate or import key".

Make sure the settings for generating the key are correct, the key needs to be 2048 bits.

After you've generated the key, change the key comment to your e-mail address, and enter a passphrase for the key. Now, make sure you copy the key from this window! Saving the public key generates a slightly different format, but Unfuddle really needs the format as it is in this window.

Save the public and private key somewhere anyway, you'll especially be needing the private key later.

In Unfuddle go to "People" > and edit the Account admin. In the bottom left you can enter a "New public key...".

When that key is accepted, go back to the "Repositories" tab and find the repository server, under your repository title (something like git@your_account.unfuddle.com:your_account/abr.git), copy this address.

Now you can set up the remote server in Visual Studio. In the menu bar, click "Git" > "Manage remotes". Give your remote server a name (no spaces) and paste the address you just copied.

Browse the private key that you stored earlier and choose hit "Load SSH key". Enter the password for that key and then you can save the connection. For some reason the "test connection" button fails for me ("ERROR:gitosis.serve.main:Need SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND in environment."), it still works though.

So now you're ready to push whatever is committed in your current branch to the remote server, use the blue up arrow ("Push changes to remote repository") to do so. You could also then push all branches and tags, or do a pull first to resolve any merge conflicts if you want.

In the next part of this series, I'll give a quick rundown of branching and merging.

So you're ready to start using Git? Here's how to start:

First of all, go and download and install the Git extensions for Windows. The featured (full) release is recommended.

In Visual Studio, you'll now see a few new buttons (in Windows Explorer, there's also some new context items that will show up when you right-click a folder).

As you can see it's a tiny toolbar, click the last icon (settings), you have to set a name and e-mail address, they will be attached to any commit you do.

I've noticed that in order for the toolbar buttons to work, I have to open a file in the solution. So just open one of the files and make sure the cursor is in the file somewhere.

Hit "Ok" and click on the folder icon ("Browse repository"). You'll be presented with a screen with three options, one of which is "Initialize repository".

Initialize the repository in the root directory of your solution, this is typically where your .sln file is. The content in this folder and everything in the subfolders will be under source control. This is also your personal repository, there is not even a central repository yet.

The repository is simply one .git folder in the solution folder.

Almost done!

You're ready to commit your project to the repository. First, make sure you ignore the appropriate files, hit the "edit .gitignore" button and add the default ignores. For me personally, this is all that I need, you might want to tweak it.

Ready. Now you can do your first commit! You can skip the "Add files" button, this will just stage all the files for a commit, you can also do this in the commit screen.

Select all of the files and click "Stage selected files", type a commit message and click "Commit".

This creates the first branche, called master. You're good to go code and make changes. When you're ready to commit again, just use the tiny toolbar button instead of the repository browser.

In the next part of this series, I'll show how to commit the changes to a remote repository using Unfuddle.com.

Version control systems are evil. They hate me and are out to get me. I can't count the number of ways that I've been bitten by SourceSafe (safe.. ha! get it?), CVS, SVN and TFS.

Enter Git, my saviour. For now. I have literally worked with Git for three days, so I know very little and I can't claim that it will be any better than the rest of them, but it sure seems like a great system and I've seen very good reviews online.

Advantages

Working with Git, as opposed to other source control systems has some key advantages.

Git is great for experimental projects, where you want to give your developers the power to experiment wildly without any of their experiments getting into the source control system if they don't work out. Making a new branch in Git is easy, merging the branch back is quick and simple. Git just gets out of your way and does the hard work for you.
Of course you could still have merge conflicts sometimes, and they need to be resolved by hand, but at least you can trust the rest of the merge to go well (unlike the horrors I've seen in CVS and SVN).

One of the things that I really like is that Git only creates one folder in your source code file structure and not one folder for each directory (like CVS/SVN). Git also does not require all your files to be read-only, like in TFS. And finally, you can just move/delete files without all kinds of errors popping up, Git just detects the move or deletion.

I have a local repository of all of the files and history my project, I can commit frequently to the local repository and when I am satisfied about my work, I could send it to a remote, central repository. Having a distributed repository also means that I am never tied to a network/internet connection to use source control.
Also, when the central repository is down, I could just find a team member that has a recent copy and pull down their repository while I wait for the central server to be fixed.

Using the Git Extensions for Windows gave me another nice little productivity nugget: a sensible and (as far as I can tell) complete list of files that need to be ignored while committing changes. Everything from "Thumbs.db" to the Resharper folders is in there, cool.

As I understand it, Git also works great with large sets of files and large teams. The Linux kernel is under Git source control and that's a lot of files and a lot of collaboration.

There are plenty more features that are cool like cherry-picking commits, the built in CVS proxy server, octopus merging, etcetera. If you want to read more, go and have a look at the Git Wikipedia article. There are some great video's on YouTube as well if you want to understand Git better. Remember that on the Windows side, you don't even need to know the command line syntax.

Disadvantages

I really haven't found any disadvantages yet to using Git. Sure, it's a new system and there's a few things to learn, but that's about it. I've only spent about a day understanding Git and I feel very comfortable already.

Of course, once I start using it more often and in a team scenario, I might run into some difficulties, we'll see.

In the next post, I'll show how easy Git is to set-up and use in Windows with Visual Studio (again, unlike for example SVN).

This site has been the target of comment spam attacks for a while now. I tried to stop the spammers by using the "Honeypot Captcha" technique as described by Phil Haack. Unfortunately, the spammers apparently already have pre-existing knowledge about the comment forms and were not fooled by the hidden textbox.

So today I was ready to waste a few hours on getting a proper captcha system implemented. I have always really liked reCAPTCHA because it's not only fighting spam, everybody filling one out is also helping to digitize books, cool.

I wish there was some complicated problems that I could explain here, but once you sign up for reCAPTCHA, you can go to the asp.net plugin page and follow the instructions. I was finished in a matter of minutes and now have an evil, but necessary captcha widget on my comment forms.