Andy Butland

Another cross post of a piece written for my company blog, on building an Alexa skill. To read, click here .

Cross posting a piece written for the Zone blog, introducing a sample site written using Umbraco Mapper and other techniques for site building in Umbraco. Read more here or review the code here .

Cross posting a piece written for my company blog going over some code and patterns for a first-look, ASP.Net Core website. Whilst building something simple, I've also looked to use some patterns of DDD and CQRS that I make use of on current ASP.Net MVC projects. Click to read over on Medium here .

Again cross-posting a piece written for Zone on their medium site. I'm extending a bot built for internal agency use with features for room booking, using LUIS and FormFlow with the Microsoft Bot Framework.

This is just a short post describing a method found for validating that the value provided for field within a page or block is unique across other instances of that content type. The specific need was for a poll block that provided a question and set of answers for users to pick from, with the results being saved to the dynamic data store. I had an "identifier" field that the editors had to complete, the value of which being unique across all polls. And rather than relying on them to remember that, it's obviously better to validate it. Here was the solution. Firstly I created an extension method that gets a list of all blocks of a given type other than the current block, looking like this: public static IEnumerable<T> GetOtherContentData<T>(this T instance) where T : IContentData { var contentTypeRepository = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IContentTypeRepository>(); var contentModelUsage = ServiceLocator.Current.GetIn...