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Great success!

HittaHem was launched a week ago and it was a great success! It took just over 24 hours to become the most popular free application on the Swedish AppStore both in the Lifestyle category and overall. The application was praised and mention on many of Sweden’s largest sites. Here’s a list of sites that wrote about the application (Swedish language warning!)

On top of that, the video of the application was the most watched/popular video on YouTube Sweden! HittaHem maintained it’s position as the most downloaded free app on AppStore Sweden for almost a whole week. Today it fell one place to nr2. Which brings us to something interesting that very few developers share, “How many downloads does it take to reach the most downloaded spot?”, I’ll give you the numbers!
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There’s a YouTube video of the application I’ve developed together with my long time friend Hampus Nilsson for Svensk Fastighetsförmedling.

Hitta hem on YouTube

Download the app here.

*NOTE* Yes, that is my iPhone in the video. Some comments on YouTube implies that it’s an unlocked/hacked iPhone because Telia is not the carrier. This is not the case. It’s an original untouched iPhone 3g 16gb bought in Italy this summer (in Trieste to be exact). iPhones are sold without contracts in Italy and Hampus and  I were lucky enough to score 3 phones from TIM. To be honest we discussed the Telenor carrier logo before the videoshoot and decided to keep it just to create some rumors and more buzz on the blogs etc. My iPod Touch however, is PWND!

You’re having problems with ImageVault and can’t really understand why, ImageVault can tell you what’s up! The most common problem when ImageVault images are broken or doesn’t resize etc is because of user rights on the Data folder where ImageVault reads and writes images. A tool you can’t live without as a web developer is Filemon from SysInternals (now bought by Microsoft), it will tell you if access rights is the problem. But if you’re still having problems or perhaps something else inside ImageVault isn’t working the way it should there’s an undocumented web.config setting that enables debug output to a text file. I don’t really understand why this setting is never mentioned in the SDK or anywhere else for that matter. I found it a while ago through Reflector (now bought by RedGate but still available in a free version), another tool you just can’t live without! Reflector can disassemble a compiled .NET dll or exe and show the real code behind it unless it’s obfuscated.

This is how you enable debug output from ImageVault:

• Create a folder to hold the output text file and make sure your application pool user can read/write files in it. Create the output file in the folder aswell, it seems ImageVault doesn’t create it if it doesn’t exist. Of course the file must also be read/writeable by the application pool user.
• Add this key to your ImageVault config in web.config: DebugErrorLog=”c:\pathtologfolder\logfile.txt”. Example:
  <imageVault DebugErrorLog=”c:\Inetpub\mysite\ImageStoreNET\Data\iv.log” ImagePathOriginal=”c:\Inetpub\mysite\ImageStoreNET\Data\ImageDB” ShoppingOrderPath=”c:\Inetpub\mysite\ImageStoreNET\Data\Orders” AdminGroups=”ImageVault Admins” EditorGroups=”ImageVault Editors” ImageVaultConnStr=”Server=sqlserver;Database=iv_database;UID=user;password=password;” />

Now perform whatever steps to produce the problem and check the errorfile to get a clue about what’s wrong. If you still can’t solve the problem now it’s time to contact Meridium for expert help, they are usually very good at helping out and provide workarounds or implement a feature that you need in a future version.

Avantime has been working with ImageVault for 4+ years for a number of customers and run the largest(?!) existing ImageVault implementation at Electrolux for their Intranet.

It’s finally live!! The reason I started this blog and the source of much of the iPhone code I’ve published is finally available on iTunes App Store! I’ve been working on an app which uses the location service to locate the device and then find real estate for sale nearby. Svensk Fastighetsförmedling is one of Swedens largest real estate agent and I already build their website (www.svenskfast.se), their intranet and their sharepoint application portal. It all started out as a research project this late summer after a trip to Italy where Hampus and I bought our iPhones (they are sim unlocked in Italy). We wanted to see what the iPhone was capable of and making a location aware internet app came natural to us. The result is “Hitta hem”. You will find it on iTunes store here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=301719769&mt=8

It’s only usable in Sweden because Svensk Fastighetsförmedling only work in Sweden. Here’s some screen shots from the app:

The search result shows how far away the real estate is. The details page has more details including a textual summary of the apartment/house for sale. Through the buttons you can immediately contact the real estate agent using mail or phone. You can also get more pictures (supports orientation) and get directions using Google maps.

The application has been complete for quite some time but legal papers selling the app, Christmas and one rejection has gotten in the way until now. I am very proud of the application. I hope you like it!

I passed the certification for EPiServer CMS 5 this week together with my colleague Mikael Jönsson. Micke and I were already certified for EPiServer 4.31 since three years ago and were surprised to hear that a certification from EPiServer is only valid for two years(!). Our employer Avantime has premium partner status with EPiServer but was now close to loosing it because our certifications were no longer valid to maintain the status. I did keep my certification number of 161 though .

Some people have stated on their blogs etc that the new certification test is much harder than before and almost “too hard”. In my opinion that’s not true, at least compared to the old test for 4.31. The questions for the CMS 5 test are much more logical and developer oriented. I remember the old test for 4.31 had a questions like “which year was Elektropost AB (now EPiServer AB) founded”, it’s been three years and I’ve never felt like that’s something I really need to know in order to successfully build websites. The test consist of 68 questsions and you only need to answer 60% correctly which is 5 percent less than the test for 4.60 and if i remember correctly the test for 4.31 required 70%. I’ve been working with EPiServer for a reasonable long time but because I’m tied up with many of Avantimes largest customers I havn’t had a chance to write much code for CMS 5, it’s actually just the last 2 few days before christmas until now (about 2 weeks) that I’ve built a complete site in CMS 5. But of course it’s much easier to pass the test if you have much experience with the EPiServer platform.

Fredrik Haglund has some good pointers on his blog to what you should focus on for taking the test. I would like to add that there are questions on some of the functions you would rarely use, depending on your clients of course, like mirroring, configuring enterprise installations with multiple sites, indexing service for search and load balancing. If you’re new to EPiServer there’s a big chance you’ve never touched those type of settings.

I wish you good luck if you’re attempting to get certified! And don’t forget to snatch some of the EPiServer stickers etc from their reception desk when you visit them, they look great on your laptop .

I just got my (fist) app rejected for App Store by Apple because it relies heavily on the internet connection being available and I didn’t have an information screen about the iPhone being in flight mode so the application wouldn’t do much. In my opinion only an idiot wouldn’t understand that an internet application wasn’t going to work with everything shut down but fair enough, i started hunting for code to detect flight mode.

Of course the developer pages Apple provide doesn’t give any hints. There’s an example on how to check which type of connection was available and that way I did implement an alert informing the user that they had to disable flight mode. But I couldn’t find a way to make the alert as sexy as Safari, with a button to open settings directly in the alert. It reads: “Turn off Airplane Mode or use Wi-Fi to access data”. After lots of searching Google I found out that to get the sexy Safari style alert you don’t need to write any code at all! It’s as simple as adding a property named “SBUsesNetwork” in the plist file for my app and the alert comes up automatically when the application launches. Here’s a screenshot of the plist setting:

It should be of type Boolean.

This last year I havn’t worked much with building new EPiServer websites at all. In fact, this year I’ve only built a single site and that’s the one I just started a few days ago. The christmas rush this year has been crazy!

The project I’m working on is actually a re-design with upgrade from EPiServer 4 to CMS5R2. Which by the way was pretty painless this time. Avantime did the very first (or at least one of the first) upgrades to CMS5 from EPiServer 4, that time using a beta version of the upgrade tool. EPiServer has come a long way with the upgrade tool since then!

Now back to what this post is really about: Ordering properties for page types suck! I had forgotten how terribly boring it is to set up the properties and we’ve discussed this many times at work. A drag-and-drop function would be really sweet. The moment the properties list gets long enough for the page to scroll it takes forever to move a property from the bottom to the top. But there is a pretty simple remedy for that. I just slapped an update panel around EPiServers’ code in EditPageType.aspx (found here C:\Program Files\EPiServer\CMS\5.2.375.7\Application\UI\Admin). Takes most of the pain away!

The big question is, why doesn’t EPiServer just throw an update panel in there themselves? Ajax for cheap!

Ever wondered how many lines of code you’ve written? Try this command in a shell:

find . -name “*” | xargs wc -l

Of course you must move to the projects’ directory first. I looked for an addon for XCode but realized it’s not needed. If you’re a windows junkie, install an add-on to VS or install Cygwin to get the *nix experience!

My iPhone project was 4164 lines. That include comments of course. But it’s also just for the client app. There’s a bunch of C# web service and sql code in the back end. How many lines is your iPhone app?