In a DD4T implementation, your templates generate data (XML, JSON) instead of HTML. It’s the web application which turns this data into good-looking HTML pages (or so one would hope).
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All posts by Quirijn Slings
Using the TridionConfigurationManager
Have you are ever been in the situation where you need to write your own DD4T templates? I don’t mean views, mind you, but real, modular Tridion templates.
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DD4T on tour – Our first developer training
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
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).
ASP.NET MVC 5 support for DD4T
It has been around for a while, but since today the ASP.NET MVC 5 version of DD4T is available through NuGet. The name of the package is DD4T-MVC5.
All you need to do is create an MVC 5 application. This is easy with Visual Studio 2013, but is also possible with Visual Studio 2012.
Once you have created the web application, go to the package manager (Tools\Nuget Package Manager\Package Manager Console) and type:
Install-Package DD4T-MVC5
That’s it. Happy coding.