Update Orchard theme using SQL statement if the UI does not work anymore

If you create a theme for Orchard, it’s only a matter of time before you stumble across a yellow screen of death. I know this, because it happened multiple times to me. One of the reasons for these errors are the dynamic objects, which are used a lot in Orchard. You won’t get compile-time errors with these objects, so they need to be handled with care. Now, when a theme causes a yellow screen you are kind of screwed as you can’t do anything anymore on the website, like logging in to the admin area. Read more →

Getting the Orchard archive to work in your blog

A few months ago I decided to migrate my weblog from SharePoint to Orchard, because it’s more lightweight and better suited as a simple blog. I also started to develop some custom modules and themes for this CMS and have to say I like it! One thing though, which has bothered me from the beginning, was the empty Archive block at the right side of my blog. I had done so much work to import the SharePoint blog entries to Orchard (a manual copy-paste action), so I knew the posts were there, I could even browse to them. Read more →

ForeFront TMG does not work after Windows Updates (Internet Explorer 9.0)

A few weeks ago I was finally able to install some updates on my ForeFront TMG server, so I installed SP1 of Windows Server 2008R2, all other updates and Internet Explorer 9.0. After noticing my internet connection didn’t work anymore I logged in on the server and wanted to check what was wrong using the Management Console. This is when I noticed the ForeFront TMG Management Console didn’t work anymore. Every treenode I selected resulted in an alert message stating ‘Member not Found’, ‘Refresh failed’, etc. Read more →

Creating a developer SSL certificate on IIS 6.0

It’s one of those things you need to do once and forget about it. Sometimes it’s necessary to develop something which required talking to a webservice. A lot of the times, the webservice is secured with an SSL certificate in the real world. As most companies don’t want to spend good money to real SSL certificates for development workstations/servers, we have to create our own. You can of course develop the functionality with a non-secured environment, but for testing purposes it’s probably useful to have the test environment match the QA or production servers. Read more →

Technical documentation: how and what to write

In the past couple of years I’ve written quite a lot of documentation, be it functional, technical, help files for end-users, flyers, proposals and much more. Most developers I know try to avoid writing these kind of things as much as they can, but let’s face it, it is part of our job. At the moment I’m working in a team with pretty smart and experienced developers, but as it goes, one of our team members has been placed on an other team at a different customer and I was asked to replace him. Read more →