The
Sitefinity Blog

Welcome to my articles on Sitefinity and the and experiences I have had. I do love helping others out and it gives me a real thrill when people approach me for help and second when I actually help them out. So here I not only hope to help others out but also hope that others take the time to help me out. I don't mind being wrong but I do hate being wrong for a long time. So call me out if you can, help me to avoid writing another Doh story.

Feb 27

Application Insights

If you are running your Sitefinity site on Azure you might as well be taking advantage of Application Insights to record and analyse performance. By default, Sitefinity logs everything to a text file. Annoyingly you can't read this because the file is locked by the app. You need to wait until it starts a new file the following day. You can push all these events to Elmah which is supported out of the box. But with Sitefinity's extension model you can write your own class to push out this information to your own logging source.

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Feb 17

Sitefinity Certification

The Sitefinity team have released the start of a new Certification process. Currently the course and exam are free until August this year. There is just the one at present, Basic Developer, so I decided I would take it and see how it compared to the last Certification exam from Sitefinity.

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Jan 28

Shared Hosting Memory Limits

If you are running your Sitefinity site on a shared hosting provider you may come across a troublesome error indicating that the available memory space is under 5% and your service can not be activated. This is a defensive measure by ASP.NET to help keep your system stable but what can you do about it?

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Jan 17

Vary By Custom

In a recent internal build the Sitefinity team has added a new feature request allowing one to control the Vary By options for output caching. I wrote a post a while back talking about how to add this functionality in. But now, I am glad to say, this post is almost completely obsolete.

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Jan 04

Sitefinity View State

Many Sitefinity sites are based on Web Forms and Web Forms use ViewState. It is common knowledge that uncontrolled ViewState can create a very large amount of data in our web pages and this data is sent back and forth with every request. There are many ways to reduce and turn off ViewState when it is not required but when it is there is one more method to help keep down the page size.

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Aug 08

Azure App Service Support

Almost from day one I thought Azure Web Sites was a better platform than Azure Cloud Services for Sitefinity. I have been running my Sitefinity instances there for 2 years now even though there was no support. But now its been announced that 8.2 will support Azure App Services, (Formerly Azure Web Sites), and I am super excited.

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Jul 21

Release 8.1

I have done several reviews of Sitefinity releases and they and this one are all following a trend in what I write. But I do have to be honest in that all the good stuff that I like to see, (bug fixes are one), are often delivered on a fortnightly basis which is always brilliant and great to see.

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Jul 02

Sitefinity and CDN's

The number one performance issue I have with my clients Sitefinity sites is their inability to manage their images. This last week I have had a job to review image management on one site and explain to another client the difference between 1MB and 20Kb image effect on their site. And to top it off a third client with a database of over 1GB of image storage. So I thought I would do a couple of posts on the subject starting with using a CDN.

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Apr 02

Returning a 404 status code

Using the custom errors and redirecting 404 requests to a Sitefinity page doesn't set\return the 404 response status. The issue arrives when your 404 page is based on a master page. To get around this you can either create a custom master page and override the render method or a widget which is added to the page.

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Mar 24

Support for Azure Websites

Currently Sitefinity supports Azure Cloud Services but in my honest opinion Azure Websites are today the much better option. I run all my Sitefinity sites on Azure Websites and enjoy all the benefits I get from it. Except no support for multiple nodes, (or load balancing) or official support from the Sitefinity team.

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