Sitefinity 4.0 SDK BETA – Now Available

Sitefinity 4.0 SDK BETA – Now Available

Posted on August 13, 2010 0 Comments

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Sitefinity development icon Hot on the heels of the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA release and the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA guides is the release of the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA SDK

Purpose

The SDK (software development kit) is designed to help .NET developers build powerful add-on’s & extensions for Sitefinity 4.0.  These add-on’s can be used for your Sitefinity project, or shared through the marketplace with the Sitefinity community.

This is our first SDK release.  We have a lot more planned, but this should get everyone started.  We also have a lot more planned for the Sitefinity marketplace.  In the future, the Sitefinity marketplace will be part of Sitefinity.  Web site administrators will be able to browse, purchase? (if applicable), download, install & uninstall these add-on’s without leaving their Sitefinity web site.  This SDK is the first step of this journey.

What’s included

The SDK includes 3 types of resources designed to help .NET developers be productive with Sitefinity:

#1 - Developer Tools

Telerik was founded on developer productivity tools.   We have almost a decade of experience in this area and we’re leveraging this experience in the Sitefinity SDK.  The SDK includes:

OpenAccess ORM will be included in future versions of the Sitefinity SDK.  We encountered some 11th hour integration issues with OpenAccess that we’re still working through.  Rest assured, we haven’t forgotten about the data layer though.  In the meantime, look at Dynamic Data offered through the Fluent API to generate dynamic persisted types at runtime.

Sample projects included with the Sitefinity SDK #2 – Samples & Tutorials

In addition to the Sitefinity documentation, we wanted to provide developers with plenty of sample projects that demonstrate best practice techniques for addressing various scenarios.  This SDK currently includes:

  • How to create a module
  • How to create a widget (control)
  • How to create a Silverlight widget
  • How to create a web site template

More samples are planned and we’ll continue to extend our current samples.  For anyone interested in Sitefinity 4.0 BETA development these samples will be an extremely valuable resource.

    #3 – Visual Studio Project Templates
    The SDK installs new Visual Project templates that can be used to quickly begin creating Sitefinity add-on’s  These templates automatically generate a lot of the starting code & structure that is required to satisfy basic requirements.  This enables developers to focus on adding unique value.
    Sitefinity Module Visual Studio Template
    The new Visual Studio template are installed in the C# category. 

What you need

The system requirements are posted on the SDK page, but quickly summarized:

  • Visual Studio 2010
  • SQL Server or Express 2008
  • Silverlight 4.0 SDK

I’ve seen some internal chatter about also supporting Visual Studio 2008.  However, at the moment the sample projects included with the SDK were created using Visual Studio 2010.  Consequently, to open these 2010 projects you will need 2010.

Download and Get Started

Additional information and the download link can be found on the Sitefinity 4.0 SDK page.  Please download, kick the tires and tell us what you think.  We’re anxious for your feedback.

Update:  Our ever watchful partner and friend Lino Tadros gave us a heads up that AVG doesn’t like the VBS that we embedded in the Welcome.hta page.  AVG warns that this file is a potential threat.  Internally at Telerik, we use different virus protection software and we never saw this warning.  We will make alterations to future versions of the SDK to remove this warning.  In the meantime, there is no risk or danger.  The warning can be bypassed without harm.  We’re using VBS merely to open the Sitefinity Project Manager and Visual Studio projects.  Sorry for any confusion on this.

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