About Rob Morrow

Rob Morrow has worked in the web development field for over 10 years. Starting as a designer, before moving into technical and SDL Tridion development. Rob enjoys auto racing, all things technology, gadgets and playing Minecraft with his son. Rob is a technical lead at Content Bloom.

An Introduction to Theme Manager, My First Alchemy Plugin

This is John's car. Seemed relevant.

This is John’s car. Seemed relevant.

I’ll let the video do most of the talking (yeah, I did a video walkthrough of the basic functionality), but the basic premise is this: on a whim (and a challenge from John), I set about creating an Alchemy plugin from scratch. Prior to this my experience with UI extensions was minimal, but Alex and John have been hooting for weeks that developing an Alchemy plugin is about a thousand times easier than creating one from scratch. So I accepted, and wrote a theme manager that allows for previewing, installing, and all sorts of other shenanigans… and a (mostly) complete theme… in less than a week.

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TridionRsaProtectedConfigurationProvider, and the Art of Zen

And it's Monday. Just sayin'.

And it’s Monday. Just sayin’.

“R-S-A protected configuration provider?! What the f#$k is that, and why the f#$k is it dying an inglorious death while taking my CM with it?!” Those words, friends, are mine. It’s a rare issue that can make me angry enough to club a baby seal silently whisper expletives at an inanimate object, but it’s Monday. And I’ve had coffee… lots of coffee. Y’see, I’ve recently been involved in upgrading an entire organization’s mission-critical servers from 2011 to 2013. For the most part, as we all hope in such circumstances, it’s been a breeze; nothing to set the pulse aflutter. Until today. And that terrible, miserable, unhelpful exception provided by ASP.NET.

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Schemas out of sync between environments? Panic!

Content Porter got you down, friend? You’ve got components from a lower environment that need to be migrated to a staging or production environment, but the schema they’re based on has changes that aren’t ready for prime time yet. It’s 1 am, and if you don’t get this solved by the start of business the sky will fall. Panic! Don’t panic. This has a very simple solution.

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Remote Debugging in Visual Studio Made Easy(ish)

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object?!!"

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object?!!”

I love Tridion. There’s a strange elegance to the way she operates, and when I resolve an issue or learn something new there’s no sweeter feeling. But oftentimes sometimes our Tridion can be a cruel mistress – or mister, as you fancy. We configure, install, develop, and implement on her all day long, and just when it seems we understand each other she delivers a sharp slap to remind us that she’s in charge. Saucy. Continue reading