Sitecore 6.6: Unable to find an embedded skin with the name ‘Telerik’

I’ve been going through the process of getting a project setup on my machine that has recently been upgraded from Sitecore 6.5 to Sitecore 6.6.  Mostly things have been uneventful, but then I tried to load the Content Editor.

I encountered the following error caused by the Telerik controls:

Telerik.Web.UI.RadToolTipManager with ID=’ToolTipManager’ was unable to find an embedded skin with the name ‘Telerik’. Please, make sure that the skin name is spelled correctly and that you have added a reference to the Telerik.Web.UI.Skins.dll assembly in your project. If you want to use a custom skin, set EnableEmbeddedSkins=false.

A new DLL (Telerik.Web.UI.Skins.dll) has been introduced to provide the Skins for Telerik controls, and this is a must-have for your development on Sitecore 6.6.  Just make sure you have that DLL where you previously had Telerik.Web.UI and you should be golden!

Telerik’s website has more information on Skins troubleshooting

Baby Steps to SoA – Step Three: Three Tiers for the Website

In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, and now we continue on our travel through the road map with ensuring separation of our logical layers in the website!

Using Trello for Scrum

A lot of the traffic that comes through this blog is related to folks looking to use Trello for agile development.  If you are using a Kanban/Lean approach, it works really well out of the box. However, if you are using a more Scrum-like approach, you may have noticed the lack of ability to do estimates or burndowns in the tool.  While trying to figure out a good way to do this, it appears I stumbled across some other folks who have already taken this step forward.

The teams behind Burndown for Trello and Scrum for Trello have developed add-ons with Scrum capabilities that Trello is currently missing.  This allows you to maintain points and hours remaining estimates, as well as report on burndown across a Trello board.  I expect the main Trello development team will likely incorporate these types of enhancements in the future, but for now, these add-ons can help bridge the gap.

Baby Steps to SOA – Step Two: Measure It

In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, and now we continue on our travel through the road map with measuring success!

Sitecore 7: Available for download!

It’s official, the new 7.0 is out there!  You can download it off of the Sitecore Developer Network at: http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%207.aspx

Coinciding with the release have been a blast of emails, twitter posts, and blog posts, including the following series from my colleagues:

• Sitecore 7: Upgrade considerations
• Sitecore 7: What’s new for developers in Elbrus
• Sitecore 7: Your content authors will love the search improvements
• Sitecore 7: What the new features tell us about Sitecore’s direction
• Sitecore 7: Three reasons to be excited

Of note: There’s an upcoming online session from Sitecore this week on using LINQ with Sitecore 7.  My team and I are going to be attending this to see what’s new.  Check out the event details:  https://plus.google.com/events/cmsu9nrjms85fs04mr4cib04q2c

Baby Steps to SOA – Step One: Analyze and Plan

In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, and now we start on our travel through the road map.

Performance tuning your Sitecore installation

I’ll be continuing the Baby Steps to SOA topic next week, but for this week I’m jumping back into the world of Sitecore.  I’ve just spent the past few weeks performance tuning another project, and there are so many rabbit-holes one has to jump down to find the culprit of a performance issue.  Networks, databases, memory leaks, caching, bad code, integration bottlenecks… so many variables that can lead to a Sitecore site performing poorly under load even when it seems all the Sitecore configurations are correct.