How to install Starter kits?

I have spent this weekend trying to crack the secret of using the Starter kits, but I had to give up. I'm hoping someone can point me to an installation guide or some basic information of how they are meant to work. Also watched the videos - nothing about installation. Whatever I have tried so far is taking me nowhere, just a tremendous vast of time - no timesaving. I hope I've missed something obvious.

1. I unzipped the kits and opened the .sln-file in VS 2010 and hit build. No errors, but now what?   What are the next steps? Hitting Run just give me messages like : "A project with an Output Type of Class Library can not be started directly"

2. Should I extract into a certain folder ?

3. Are the starter kits meant to be installed in the Project Manager somehow?


Atle

You should be able to just right click the main project 'sitefinitywebapp' and say 'open in browser'

Thank you Kristian!
Now I understand a little more. I have error messages, but I hope I can handle that.
Maybe the project needs to be upgraded to SP1. That's easy from the Project Manager with other projects, but I guess Starter Kits are not registrated in Project manager. Still a little confused about that.

Atle

The newer versions are available to download under your account for sp1

I did just that. I will do some more work on this during the week.

Regards

Hello Guys,

I was trying to install the Non Profit Starter Kit today and am banging my heade against the wall as I tried so many things and still couldn't get it working. I was trying to access it through the Sitefinity Project Manager but was not able to configure it. Is there a way to do that. This post just indicates to run it straight from the Visual Studio I believe.

Is there any installation document available on this.

Cheers,
Imran

Hi Imran,
I haven't found any spesific information about the Starter Kits yet. But I did make the Education Starter Kit work after some problems. Basically the trick is to open the project in VS 2010 and right clicked on SitefinityWebApp and then "View in Browser" as Kristian kindly told me in this thread. There is no way to make this work together with Project Manager as far as I know.
I had 2 problems, first the Telerik.web.UI was wrong version, and then the the database was wrong version. After fixing that things looks quite nice.

Thanks Atle. I opened the starter kit using Visual Studio 2010 and changed the database to using the SQL 2008 R2 instead of Express Edition.  All needed was to changed the connection string and it worked. It would be great though to have the flexbility to access tham from the Project Manager in future as then it saves to install the visual studio if one just wants to use them to explore some of the feature sets possible in Sitefinity. Thanks again for the information.

Imran

Hi Imran and Alte,

We plan to incorporate the starter kits inside our SDK distribution so that you can easily select the database you want to use. We also plan to include Open Existing Project functionality in the project manager so that people can open existing projects without the need to modify the Projects.xml file.

You can still open the starter kits inside the project manager if you edit the Project.xml with a new project element that points to the file location of your starter kit similar to this:

I tell you, this whole starter kit thing is MUCH harder to get working if you have the latest version of all of the other telerik products installed. Open Access and RadControls seem to be getting in the way.

I'm not too far off abandoning the whole thing.

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Stuart

Hey Stuart,

Some of this is very intrinsic to how .NET works.  (Strongly-typed version-dependent assembly references)

Hopefully most of these problems will be addressed with tomorrow's release.  We'll be synchronized with the release schedule of other Telerik products.  Consequently, the Sitefinity product won't be shipping with a slightly outdated version of other Telerik tools.  It will be harder for customers to get ahead of us.

In the meantime, I wrote a blog post related to this subject:

http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/gabesumner/posts/10-09-01/installing_a_different_version_of_radcontrols_alongside_sitefinity.aspx

We welcome elegant solutions to this challenge.  Let me know if you have ideas.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

I can't even find the starter kits download anywhere.  Did it disappear with the upgrade to 4.1?  When I click on links to download the start kit, it takes me to the page where I can download project manager or the full install.  I can't see where either of those includes the starter kits.  Help!

The Starter Kits are still being upgraded and not yet available for download.

You're correct though, this is confusing ~ click download, download is nowhere to be seen.   /:|

--

It's probably not worthwhile to remove the starter kit pages for a couple of days and then re-add then when the download is available.  The downloads will be re-added soon.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Gabe,

Sorry for being so blunt, but the problem with Sitefinty Team is you guys just do somethings and expect customers to not notice it.... or take customer for granted...

Do you know how frustating it is when you expect things to work in a certain way and then you change it without letting anybody know about it... and not leaving any trace behind... We are left wondering what happenned?

How difficult is it to put a note saying 'Starter Kits' will be back in few days instead of just deleting it and keeping mum? Right now, things are not going well for you guys but this lack of communication is not helping it in any way.

Hey Larry,

I can completely relate to your frustrations.  Internally it's not that we "expect customers not to notice" or "take customers for granted".  Instead, we're simply managing a lot of complexity and sometimes innocent changes have unintended consequences.  

In this example, the product team is responsible for uploading new versions & builds of the products.  From their perspective, the SDK and Starter Kits weren't yet prepared but customers were obviously anxious for the 4.1 release.  So they made the release available. Customers that are interested in older releases can click the "Previous versions" link on the Downloads page. There they will find older versions of Sitefinity & the Starter Kits.  

--

However, from a marketing perspective we have starter kit landing pages.  These pages direct customers to the downloads page where they expect to immediately see download links (not an archive link).  As a result, an innocent change (uploading a new Sitefinity version) caused an unintended customer facing issue.

It's not something I'm happy about, but this is what is happening.  In any event, I'll contact the team and see if we can add a disclaimer.  I apologize for the frustration.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Thank you so much for the clarification... I understand so much is going on with Sitefinity, it's easy to loose track...

Hopefully, we can all learn something from these experiences..