VS2012 Usability - Sitefinity - Front- & Back-End Development

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Posted by Community Admin on 28-Jun-2012 00:00

Hey all,

Just two little UX thingies...

When the 'preview' button is turned on in VS2012 RC (annoying feature but apparently a default one) Thunder's Sitefinity explorer goes overboard because it can't render a preview when clicking on a template.

The option 'Show/Hide all files' isn't functional for a 'Sitefinity Website Templates' project. When you're developing your theme with .css files or .less files it means you have to include them in your project to be able to edit them.

But when you include them in your project, on 'publish' it pushes all files out, instead of only the .min.css file you'd like to get published.

Ideally you'd be able to toggle 'show/hide all files' so you can pick any of your 20 .less files to edit and include only the .min.css in your project so that file is the only one getting published.

Jochem

Posted by Community Admin on 29-Jun-2012 00:00

Hello Jochem,

Could you explain what you mean by "Thunder's Sitefinity explorer goes overboard"? We do not support preview and that option should not affect the Sitefinity Explorer in any way. If you experience some strange behaviour, could you tell us how you reproduce it?

We are aware of this issue. Unfortunately, implementing "Show/Hide all files" is not an easy task. We have discussed a few alternative solutions but nothing to be announced publicly yet.

Thank your for your feedback. It is greatly appreciated.

All the best,
Marin Atanasov
the Telerik team

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Posted by Community Admin on 29-Jun-2012 00:00

Hey Marin,

Well to start with the non scientific explanation first: When 'preview' is on in the Solution Explorer and you switch to the Sitefinity Explorer and open a widget node my laptop's fan is starting to do a pretty impressive turbine impersonation....

When having a preview-item open and pulling a file in from the Sitefinity Explorer it takes roughly 2-3x as long and when you're heavy browsing/clicking through templates the previewed item sometimes gets docked like a regular item.

Ofcourse, since it's Visual Studio 2012 RC, it could all be a problem with VisualStudio and not Thunder, just wanted to point it out.

---
I'm 101 when it comes to templates and creating VisualStudio extension, but by creating a custom project template which inherits from the MPF type (which hasn't implemented show/hide) it looks good but makes it difficult for both you and us...

Wouldn't it be easier to create a project template based on the 'web' project type with either C#/VB or nothing as the subtype ?

This way a theme/template could be coded/edited the same way as the SitefinityWebApp project. That would also allow us to for instance pull down NuGet packages into the Template project (think Twitter Bootstrap or template specific JS). Something not possible at the moment.

Yes it would mean there wouldn't be an 'easy' way to detect the root folder to right-click and say upload, but I wouldn't mind some hidden .manifest or .config if it would allow me to code/design flexibility I'm most comfortable with.

Jochem

Posted by Community Admin on 04-Jul-2012 00:00

Hi Jochem,

About the potential CPU load that you maybe experience - here on the test machines there are absolutely no CPU usage peaks during this operation. VS 2012 is still RC and this might be one of the reasons. The operation is nothing but open of a file and then it is VS that is responsible for the previews.

Regarding the flavored project approach - we started it this way but there are certain limitations which made us to switch to the MPF approach. Also another reason is that we're planning to extend this project in the future - it was only themes, now it is templates and after that who knows. There are pros and cons in both of the approaches and we'll definitely continue to improve Thunder doesn't matter which one we use. We may easily end up with both :)

We really appreciate your feedback and thank you for your suggestions, we'll have them in mind.

All the best,
Pavel Iliev
the Telerik team

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