Version 10 Hails the Community

NuGet Feed

NuGet may be a good start. Kentico's very own NuGet feed started some time ago, however, now it shows its full potential. You are probably familiar with the library package, draft integration, or MVC one but with the release of Kentico 10, there will be others. The humongous NuGet with all Kentico's libraries will split into four smaller ones.

We didn't make it happen just because we can, but because it's very handy. Just imagine the situation–You're trying to build some utility for Kentico to help the society around our CMS. Before NuGet, you had to copy or reference the assemblies manually from clean Kentico installation and also every time you applied a hotfix or upgrade. This is now relatively straightforward with the NuGet feed. However, you must manage all the libraries that we have, even ones that are entirely useless for an external solution. Why would you reference megabytes of web form logic when your tool uses MVC or WPF?

It wasn't easy to get rid of the unwanted pieces from the big pack. You could go one by one, trying to delete what you presume is useless. Role playing a bomb-squad member defusing a ticking warhead. However, sooner or later, the most innocent library will ruin your act of valor. Do you see yourself in this scenario? We do. That’s why we split the NuGet package into core and front-end. As we like things nice and tidy, we also separated the third-party libraries and our automated testing support. We are saving you a headache and serving you this smaller NuGet. It's your call which one you need.

Layer Separation

The path of the righteous man to achieve this split was beset on all sides by obstacles. The significant barrier was the entangled references between the presentation layer and the business one. As a matter of fact, it was the cornerstone of the success. Layer separation was the first phase. Besides the smaller NuGet packages, we achieve a cleaner and more organized solution. This is helping our developers to solve issues like bugs with greater efficiency. However, it's also a tremendous help for the community developers. Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal for the hardcore Kentico veterans, but even those guys will locate the correct class or its method with ease in some dark, unexplored corner of Kentico.

AD import

Now, a little different story. You should already be informed about our GitHub activities. The KInspector is one of the most attractive ones. It was time to move on with the open-source strategy. The number of requests and ideas for what could be done or improved with AD import was enormous. It's very clear that this kind of utility is useful for various needs, although most of them need a little tweak or enhancement. Real life cases differ so much they're hard to comprehend in a general way. Who likes to wait till the new version anyway? Especially when the users are top notch developers with a precise vision.

That's why the release of Kentico 10 will be accompanied by the open sourcing of the AD import tool. I believe it's a huge opportunity for the community to make this popular tool even better, and eventually, perfect. Everybody with an idea is welcome to add a helping hand and uplift the usability and hopefully help thousands of others.

Community

I hope you all agree we hail the community with Kentico 10. I've also mentioned Ideas and Marketplace at the beginning. Big things are coming in the case of the marketplace. It will take some time, but it will be here sooner than you think. And the ideas.kentico.com? I appreciate this excellent source of thoughts. It has undergone a significant and very necessary clean up. A lot of ideas were declined due to inactivity, questionable vision alignment, or very old age. However, there's one not too shabby list of implemented ideas. We are taking great care of the most interesting ones even though we can't fulfill everything. Please continue posting and voting for ideas. There’s a pretty decent chance your one will be realized in the next version.