Well, I‘ve finally recovered from quite the hectic holiday season and am settling back into the swing of things here at Bit-Wizards. The past few months have been jammed packed with projects, meetings, a few business trips, and not enough sleep. When I finally got a chance to relax, I thought about all of the blogs I have written over the last year and thought I would share a few with you that I find helpful. (Yes, I refer to my own blogs all the time when I can’t remember how to do something!)
So…Here’s my top 7 blogs of 2013! (Top 7? Why not? Mix it up a little and pick an odd number…)
#7 Restore SQL Azure Data to SQL Server 2012
In my second article of 2013 I explain how to restore a SQL Azure database to a stand-alone SQL Server 2012 instance. Running sites within Azure is an awesome solution, but sometimes you need that data local for testing and future development. This blog gives your step by step instructions on how to get your production data on your local server.
#6 Kentico CMS Custom Table Registration
This is one of my favorite kind of blogs to write. I ran into a weird scenario of a custom table I manually registered being deleted after I unregistered from Kentico. While this is not a bug, it’s a very important piece of info that developers need to be aware of when creating their Kentico sites. This blog walks you through the registration process and provides screenshots and tips along the way.
#5 Site Generation using the Kentico API
Another How-To article! Much like #5, this blog was born out of personal experience and wanting to spread the info to the community. I had a project where I needed to automate some site creation and thought it would make a great blog on the process. Covering CSS creation, users / roles, templates, and then pages, the blog covers a lot of areas that can benefit anyone looking to leverage the Kentico CMS API for site generation.
#4 Retrieving Attachment Info using the Kentico REST Service
Ok, this was an interesting article I came up with after figuring out how to leverage some great Kentico functionality. The project required us to extend the REST API for some content tree manipulation and part of that was to get the Attachment Info for documents. This blog details passing specific values to the REST service to get the data you need and really shows how you use the service for some really custom solutions for your projects.
#3 Kentico Rocks – a New Podcast for Developers
While not a very in-depth article, this blog signifies a start of a great side-project between myself and fellow Kentico MVP
Brian McKeiver. We both recognized the need for more developer-centric content in the Kentico community and thought this was a great way to get some of our real-world experience out to the public. We’re now up to 5 episode and going strong and it all started with this one.
#2 Kentico & Microsoft PunchOut for the Gulf Coast .NET User Group Site
This was definitely the most entertaining blog I wrote this year. While more of an overview of the GCDNUG site and its use of Kentico and Windows Azure, the article demonstrates some great reporting features of both platforms and why it makes so much sense. The real fun was in the actual writing where I decided to highlight an [ahem] esteemed friend my past. If anything, you should get a chuckle out of the content and hopefully learn a little about Kentico and Azure along the way.
#1 Kentico Web Farms Explained
At any Kentico event I always get asked about Kentico and web farms and Azure. In this blog I wanted to document a lot of the details so people could reference it later and hopefully answer any questions I may have missed when we talked (it tends to happen over a beer or two at the social event so there’s no warranty on the info!). This blog explains how content flows through Kentico and synchs to the servers, as well as some differences and improvements made over the years. It also covers some important aspects of synching when running in Azure along with some best practices.
So there you have it.
21 blogs in 2013 and these are some of my favorites. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do writing them. Keep an eye out for even more content in 2014!