Sitecore Media Library Policeman. Free shared source module.

Greetings! It is my pleasure to announce the very first module for Sitecore CMS I developed in collaboration with Ivan Sharamok finally made it to Shared Source Library.

The idea behind the module belongs to a customer who was willing to take full control over the Sitecore Media Library in their multi site solution. Managing more than 15 sites on one instance, it is important to restrict permissions on different areas of the content tree, as well as /media library branch.

I’ve seen too many situations in my practice where this important aspect has been neglected and hundreds of media files ended up in the root of media library, causing all sorts of performance and compatibility issues.

This module will hopefully provide a good starting point for what you can do in terms of policing your Media Library.

Instead of writing a bunch of boring docs, I decided to put a boring video on YouTube.

Enjoy!

Sitecore Logging Part 4. Integration with Log4Net Dashboard.

In my older posts I was showing how to teach Sitecore CMS to log events into a SQL Server database, today it is time to reveal the last part of this blog series.
Having everything in SQL is great, and it already enables you run queries, but wouldn’t it better to have some sort of a visual dashboard showing you all new events, highlighted by severity and type, and also let you filter those?

Read more »

SMTP Connection Test Script with ASP.NET

Slightly off topic today, one of the few posts not about Sitecore CMS.
A small challenge I had to deal with – troubleshoot a number of SMTP servers, trying to figure out which one can actually relay.
As basic as this sounds, I have not found a ready to go ASP.NET script on the web that can help me. So I decided to build my own.

The idea is simple – use standard SmtpClient class, wrap the Send() method in try/catch and output the exception.

SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(server, int.Parse(port));
client.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(username, password);
MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage(from, to);
mailMessage.Subject = "Test Email";
mailMessage.Body = "Hello, this is a test email from BayNET. Please ignore.";
try
{
   // trying to send...
   client.Send(mailMessage);
   Response.Write("Success!!!");
}
// catching SmtpException 
catch (SmtpException exception)
{
   Response.Write(String.Format("Cannot send mail. Status Code {0}. Details:{1}", exception.StatusCode, exception.Message));
}

The files can be downloaded from here.

Ideas were taken pretty much from the folks at stackoverflow.com.

Happy SMTP relaying!

Sitecore Logging Part 3. Adding custom parameters to the log.

Summer…I am on a blog posting spree :-)

This is a continuation of the sage about SQL logging for Sitecore CMS. As I previously blogged, you can easily have Sitecore log to a SQL database instead of a flat text file.
Now what if we take it one step forward and have Sitecore output more information than we had before, including Sitecore Context User, Sitecore Context Item Id and raw server URL?
Well, after some digging, here is the solution for you.

Read more »

Sitecore Error in Package Designer/Installation Wizard

I just got the following exception in the Package Designer on my fairly clean Sitecore 6.1 install.

Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

Exception Details: System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.
Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types.
Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.]
   System.Reflection.Module._GetTypesInternal(StackCrawlMark& stackMark) +0
   System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes() +96
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Installer.Commands.Commands.Init() +48
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Installer.Commands.Commands..cctor() +6

[TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for 
   'Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Installer.Commands.Commands' threw an exception.]
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Installer.Commands.Commands.Init() +36
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Installer.Designer..ctor() +10

Based on the findings from our support portal, I found out that quite a few customers had the same issue and that is it also popping up in Installation Wizard.
So I decided to publish a quick post about it.

The stack trace indicates that the Installer app is trying to load some commands via reflection and obviously fails during this process.
By merging the bin directory of my Sitecore installation with the clean distributive, I found out that a few assemblies were somehow different, specifically Sitecore.Kernel.dll and Interop.Shell32.dll. So I copied them over from the clean distributive…and that resolved the issue!
It begs the question how it happened specifically, and my hunch is that somehow the DLLs got overwritten during the build process by Visual Studio, but let’s keep that as mystery.

Happy troubleshooting!