Developing Custom RenderTags

Did you ever think of implementing your own RenderTag to ease up template development?
Management Server already provides everything you need for that task. There was only one small bug that was actually blocking the load mechanism of custom RenderTags. This was fixed for version 11 now and will soon be available in one of the next hotfixes for 10.1 SP2.

Here are the steps to develop your own RenderTag:

1. Open up Visual Studio and create a new class library project, e.g. My.CustomRenderTag
2. Add references to Reddot.CMS and Reddot.CMS.Rendering
3. Now add a new class and implement the Reddot.CMS.Rendering.IRenderTag interface, e.g. HelloWorldRenderTag:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Reddot.CMS.Rendering.Tags;
using Reddot.CMS.Rendering.Objects;
using System.Xml;
using Reddot.CMS.Rendering;
namespace My.CustomRenderTag
{
    public class HelloWorldRenderTag : IRenderTag
    {
        public HelloWorldRenderTag()
        {
        }
        public void Render(RenderStream outputStream, TagProcessor tagProcessor, XmlNode tag, ObjectLoadManager objectLoadManager, PageBuildContext context)
        {
            string text = tag.InnerText;
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text))
            {
                outputStream.WriteLine("Hello World!");
            }
            else
            {
                outputStream.WriteLine("Hello {0}!", tag.InnerText);
            }          }
    }
}

4. Build the project
5. Adapt the main.config in your ASP directory:
add the following line in the <RenderTag>-section:
<RenderTags>
      <Tag name="helloworld" typename="HelloWorldRenderTag" namespace="My.CustomRenderTag" filename="<PathToAssembly>\My.CustomRenderTag.dll" />
6. Kill the RDCMSServiceProcess.exe
7. Now add your new RenderTag (<helloworld>) to your template

Delivery Server publication in Management Server 11

OpenText Web Site Management Server 11 has a completely reworked publication to OpenText Web Site Management Delivery Server. Management Server is from version 11 on using the WCF based Delivery Server .Net Remote API. This API is based on the new Delivery Server web services that have been introduced in version 4.0 and that have been further improved with version 9.0.

Does this lead to any changes in your projects? The answer is simply no. We have just been improving the way Management Server communicates with the Delivery Server without the need of changing your projects.

What is expected from this change?
The change is part of our big rework of the Management Server and is needed to get rid of the old outdated Microsoft SOAP toolkit. We also expect to have a more reliable communication and can get rid of the old web services in Delivery Server in later versions. We also are planning to introduce new features to make the publication to Delivery Server even more reliable.

Using RQL in OpenText Web Site Management Server 11

Manuel recently posted (RQL Development with OpenText Web Site Management Server 11) about how to adopt plugins for version 11.

From an R&D perspective, I want to give some more details. Manuels examples actually do not use WCF. Instead, Manuel shows an example on how to currently (in the version 11 Technology Preview) execute RQLs. There is no WCF magic in it. It is just showing how to access some .Net 4 based wrapper objects to execute RQLs.

For the final release of version 11, we will replace the webservice that was previously available under the following url by a WCF based implementation: http://localhost/cms/webservice/RDCMSXMLServer.wsdl
This old webservice was using the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 3.0. This is quite outdated and was never really supported on 64bit platforms. We will not change the webservice interface described with the WSDL.

The new webservice will be build using WCF, which is a core part of the Microsoft .Net Framework. The WCF based service will still be using the SOAP protocol. Heh, you will certainly say, there is still SOAP in it. Confusing, right? SOAP is just the protocol used and the toolkit respectively the framework used before is called the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit.

Regarding the performance:
At the moment, we cannot really compare it, but we would expect that using the WCF webservice should be faster than the old way of using a COM+ object that was than using COM Interop.

I hope, this makes it a bit clearer.

OpenText Web Site Management Server 11 and Microsoft SQL Server Denali

I'm currently testing Microsoft SQL Server Denali CTP1 with our Open Text Web Site Management Server 11 product. At the moment, everything is running fairly good on SQL Denali. I cannot see any bugs related to Denali so far.

Denali CTP1 itself is quite buggy when using it with SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2. I was not able to create a new database or attach an existing database using SQL Server Management Studio. It only worked when I attached the database using sqlcmd.

I'm eagerly awaiting Denali CTP3 that should be available in mid of July.