Yearly Archives: 2014

10 Years of Tridion

Tridion

Exactly 10 years ago tomorrow I joined an Amsterdam-based company which had just released version 5.1 of their flagship product, a web content management system called Tridion, which was also the company name.

After attending the Discovery Training on my first day, followed by some more trainings, I spent my first months mainly upgrading Tridion databases from customers from the previous version of Tridion (Tridion DialogServer or R4) to the latest version. The tools I was using most in those days were Tridion Database Manager and the infamous Binary Split Tool, a piece of software developed to handle Multimedia Components, which were only introduced with version 5 of Tridion [Can you imagine a life without Multimedia Components, Tridionauts?].

Certificate Tridion Discovery Training

After leaving the company in 2007, then already acquired by SDL, I kept doing Tridion consulting work. This brought me to 5 (!) continents and I was able to experience some of the greatest cities, from New York City to Dubai, and from Cape Town to Tokyo. Even more importantly, I had the privilege to meet and work with great people, around the globe.

Joining Tridion eventually also led to co-founding Trivident, a company of which I was dreaming about when I was still a youngster. At Trivident we are offering a full range of Tridion consultancy and development services, so I still have Tridion on my mind every day.

Ten years. A decade is a long time and it’s been an incredible ride. I honestly don’t have a clue what I would have been doing right now if I didn’t walk into the Tridion office in November 2004. May the next 10 years be even better for all of us!

DD4T on tour – Our first developer training

DD4T, Services, Tridion

Last week saw the premiere of Trivident’s new 2-day DD4T developer training.  I traveled to the United Kingdom to deliver it to a group of very knowledgeable ASP.NET MVC developers with little or no Tridion skills.

Once again it was proven that DD4T successfully closes the gap between the world of Tridion and the world of web application developers. By the end of day 2, they were already quite productive. So much so, in fact, that I ran out of material and had to improvise a bit.

The training environment was based on Tridion 2013 SP1 and ASP.NET MVC 5. For me the first time to try that combination, but it ran smoothly right away.

We hope to be delivering this training more often.

Debugging DD4T with IIS Express

ASP.NET MVC, DD4T

I’ve always thought the only way to debug a DD4T application is to run it on IIS. This is annoying, because the default option that Visual Studio offers is IIS Express or the local development server. So every time I set up a new DD4T project, I created a site in IIS, and changed the project properties accordingly. I must have wasted hours of my life doing this!

The reason why I went through all that trouble, is that it was the only way to run with Tridion’s 64-bit DLLs. Or SO I THOUGHT!

Turns out I have been wrong all along. You can run IIS Express in 64-bit mode by simply changing one registry setting.

  • Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\WebProjects
  • Modify or create theREG_DWORD value named “Use64BitIISExpress”
  • Change the value to 1

Now you can run your DD4T applications on your IIS Express, which is the default for Visual Studio 2013. Saves a lot of hassle.

Thanks a lot to Robert Bernstein (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rob/archive/2013/11/14/debugging-vs2013-websites-using-64-bit-iis-express.aspx).