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The Sitefinity team has been busy with preparing a new Software Development Kit that ease the process of running and deploying Sitefinity sample projects to your local environment. I am glad to announce that the new SDK release features a significant set of improvements and new developer tools that will help you make most of your custom Sitefinity solution. Below is quick summary of the features included in this release.
We have separated the Sitefinity installation from the SDK which gives us flexibility to release more frequent versions of the SDK against the latest official releases of Sitefinity if needed. The new distribution has as a prerequisite the official installation of Sitefinity 4.1.
The backbone of the SDK is a new Samples Browser that is a great learning resource, and will significantly decrease the learning curve of custom development with Sitefinity. With its first version you can easily run and deploy samples without the need to open them in Visual Studio, or manually modify their connection strings. This is especially handy when you would like to build on top of our Education and Non-Profit starter kits now delivered with the SDK itself. The new Samples Browser delivers the following functionality:
With the recent upgrade of OpenAccess ORM in Sitefinity, Sitefinity 4.1 is in sync with the latest bits of OpenAccess ORM. The current release of the SDK features the latest developer installation of OpenAccess ORM Q1 2011 SP1. Similar to the other tools that are include in the product – RadControls for Silverlight Q1 2011 and RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax Q1 2011, OpenAccess can be used for extending and enhancing your custom Sitefinity solutions only.
The release also delivers the latest product documentation with significant enhancements of our how-to articles all based on your feedback.
Last but not least is a new transparent way of setting up the samples. Each sample is created on the fly and doesn’t ship with an existing database. The first time a sample is run, the Global.asax file takes care of creating a new Sitefinity user, registering the necessary modules in Sitefinity, registering the necessary widgets in the toolbox, creating a home page for your sample and registering a special theme applied to the home page. We have separated this logic in a special SampleUtilities.cs that you can play with. Note that the very first run of the sample might take around a minute as its initializing a new Sitefinity instance that will host your sample.
Below are a few known issues that we look forward to resolving with our next release.
Don’t miss the chance to participate in our Sitefinity Designers Challenge and win 500$ as Amazon gifts or Sitefinity Standard Edition with one year full subscription worth 1999$. To learn more visit our Marketplace Challenge.
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