Welcome to the Content Studio SDK

The Content Studio Software Development Kit (SDK) includes documentation, as well as code examples within the topics, for Content Studio .NET.

The Content Studio SDK describes the technologies that Content Studio provides for developers. It contains overview information and step-by-step, how-to procedures for programming with Content Studio that can help you get started writing applications. You can find several code examples within the documentation, as well as some tips and best practices for using the development platform of Content Studio.

The SDK documentation intends to give a fairly detailed understanding of what Content Studio can do. The primary audiences are web site and Intranet developers, server administrators and others who want to explore the capabilities of Content Studio. It may also advice IT architects and system engineers when making decisions to set up a web site.

The documentation of Content Studio consists of many parts, with different subjects and target groups. Information about generic technologies (XML, Windows, .NET etc.) can be found via other publicly available sources. They will however be described briefly when needed to explain proprietary technologies.

The documentation is divided into the following sections:

• CS5 Technical overview: This is the technical information of Content Studio. The purpose is to give developers enough information to create and maintain reasonably advanced sites. It is however not intended to cover all aspects and details, but should be detailed enough for most people.
• Articles: Detailed documentation of specific aspects of Content Studio. It may also contain reference documentation and other more technical documents.
• API Documentation: This is a complete description of the Content Studio API. All mechanisms used by Content Studio and its components are made available to the developers. All classes, methods, constructors and properties are included; often with explicit code examples

About Content Studio

Content Studio (CS) is a generic content management and publishing platform, based on the server technology from Microsoft. It enables high data security level, strict access control and good scalability. The published material can follow any standard (i.e. HTML, XHTML, XML, Excel, PDF etc.) and it is possible to control the presentation in great detail for any specified platform (i.e. web browsers, WAP terminals and external databases).

Content Studio is a module based and multi-layered server application. The most important parts, except for the Content Studio Server module, are the operating system (Microsoft Windows Server), its security and access mechanisms (i.e. Active Directory), the document database (Microsoft SQL Server), and the web server (Microsoft Internet Information Server). Together they form a powerful and flexible platform

One Content Studio installation can manage one or many web sites, external webs or internal webs. All server components are shared between the sites. All this is maintained and administrated via a web interface, where no components need to be installed on the client hardware.

Content Studio is based on Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 / 4.5. It is assumed that web developers have at least basic knowledge of the Microsoft web technologies (especially ASP.NET and C#) and web programming (HTML/XHTML, XML, CSS etc.). For more detailed information on Microsoft .NET Framework, please refer to the official Microsoft web sites http://www.microsoft.com/net/ and http://msdn.microsoft.com/net.

What is new in CS 5.7 Update 1

Release Jan 2016

• New functionality and improvements
  • Support for TinyMCE Html WYSIWYG-Editor in the The New Editorial Interface aka. CSEdit
    • Integration with the standard browse dialog
    • Support for user controls
  • Improvements to asynchronous Event Actions
    • Support for rescheduling of failed jobs
    • Extended processes can add jobs to the queue (special permission needed)
  • Added detailed image information, such as camera information, in CSEdit
  • Preview for different device types - i.e. typical tablet and smart-phone.
  • Improvements to Ept schema
    • Improved Xsd-schema that can be used to validate Ept data.
    • Support for previewing Xsd-schemas in CS Admin
    • Support for schema validation of data in the SynchronizedEptDocument Save method
• Bugs
  • A number of other minor fixes

Read more

What is new in CS 5.7

Release April 2015

• New functionality

  • The New Editorial Interface has been redesigned to improve usability on any modern device such as computers, smart-phones and tablets.

  • A new image scaling and cropping functionality.

    • Crop and scale an image directly from the New Editorial interface
    • A built in face detection functionality that automatically detects faces and focuses on them when cropping an image

  • Upload images directly from the browse dialog in the New Editorial interface

  • Preview and optionally restore older document versions directly in the New Editorial interface

• Improvements

  • Improved full-text search

    • Document title is now included in the built-in full-text search

  • Improved recycle bin

    • Delete empty categories even though there are documents that once belonged to that category.
    • Preview deleted image in the recycle bin
  • Improvements to the Site copy utility
  • Improvements to VSI (Visual Studio integration)

What is new in CS 5.6 Update 1

Release September 2014

• New functionality and improvements

  This update adds functionality that did not make it in the 5.6 release and fixes problems found after the 5.6 release.

What's new in CS 5.6

Release May 2014

• New functionality
  • New editorial interface with support for modern devices and browsers
    • Simple and fast with focus on site content maintenance
    • Built with latest HTML 5 technique
    • Supports Linux, Windows and Mac (Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 10+ and Firefox)
    • Supports smart-phones such as Windows Phone, Android and IPhone
    • Supports tablets (IPad, Windows and Android)
  • Updated ImageDialog control to interact with the new interface.
  • Updated LinkDialog control to interact with the new interface.
  • Updated Telerik integration to interact with the new interface.
  • Added support for lists and filtered lists in the new interface.
  • New TwitterTimeline control
  • HTML 5 file upload for the new interface.
• Improvements
  • Improved support for Internet Explorer 11
  • Improved version of VSI (Visual Studio Integration)
  • Fixed errors in the Site Copy utility
  • Many minor bug-fixes and improvements

What's new in CS 5.5

Release Q1 2013

• New functionality
  • Support for relocation of documents between compatible categories
  • Support for relocating of categories
  • A new and improved Site Copy Utility
• Improvements
  • Improved support for Internet Explorer 10
  • Improved integration with Telerik rich-text editor
  • Many minor bug-fixes and improvements.

What's new in CS 5.4

Release September 2012

• New functionality
  • New control: A new Webitor control that works with all modern web browsers
  • Support for renaming units and categories
  • Support for Unicode names in units, categories and file names
  • TwitterProfileWidget; a control that displays tweets from an account.
  • EIdentityLogin; a control that lets a user sign-in the a web site using Swedish E-legitimation as provider.
• Improvements
  • Improved versioning
    • More document properties are now a part of the existing versioning system.
  • Support for Windows 8 / Server 2012
  • Support for Internet Explorer 10
  • Improved site validation for XHTML 1.1
  • Support for SQL Server 2012
  • Improved installation program
    • The installer can now use a SQL Server login during installation and upgrade
    • Support for SQL login for the runtime

What's new in CS 5.3 Sp1

• New functionality
  • New control: Facebook like button
  • New control: Google analytics
  • Support for custom API extensions
• Many designer problems fixed.
• Many other issues fixed.
• Better support for Internet Explorer 9

What's new in CS 5.3

• Improved synchronous EventActions:
  • Event added: OnDocumentRevisionRestore.
  • Event added: OnDocumentPreview.
  • Event added: OnDocumentPreviewDispose.
  • Multiple synchronous handlers for the same event and category.
  • It is now possible change document meta data and content in OnBeforeDocumentSave handlers.
  • More document properties are available in handlers.
  • Support for custom configuration files in synchronous event actions handlers.
• New view: My Recycling Bin.
• Support for virtual file systems
• Support for custom control editors
• Improved installation program.
• Some minor problems fixed
• A new and improved version of the Visual Studio integration plugin (VSI)
• Improved Ept data source control
• New improved webitor server control replaces the older AS-component.
• Improved performance for custom views.
• Improved spell checking. This module can now determine installed dictionaries dynamically.

What's new in CS 5.2 SP1

• Improved support for Internet Explorer 8 in the administrative interface.
• Improved synchronous EventActions handlers.
• New library that facilitates authoring of asynchronous EventActions handlers.
• Support for custom property value editors in the GUI for users/server controls
• Fixed performance issues with XML menus
• Fixed problems with asynchronous event actions that do not fire
• Some minor problems fixed
• Improved installation program.

What's new in CS 5.2

What's new in CS 5.1

• Converted modules
  • Spell-checking (dictionaries are in a simple text format).
  • Track changes
  • Workflow server
  • New managed engine for image processing.
  • New managed engine for extended search result.
• Improvements
  • Full-text searching has been radically improved for customers running SQL Server 2005
  • Full-text search now supports the FREETEXT clause
    • Earlier only CONTAINS was supported (advanced, precise searching)
    • Now also FREETEXT for simple searching sensitive to forms of words and synonyms
    • Support for language sensitive searches. A language must be specified for word forms and synonyms.
  • Optimized xml filter queries
  • Radically improved performance for large menu structures (requires SQL Server 2005)
  • User controls now can act as presentation templates.
  • It is now possibly to use User Controls in EPT, thus making them available to editors on the Web site just like the old Live Object technology.
  • You can now use User Controls for including documents instead of the Insert document component. This improves performance.
  • Installed server controls now turns up in the tool box thus making them easy to use.
  • Improved support for User Controls and Server controls.
  • All code is now .NET
    • Support for 64 bit operating systems
    • More reliable and robust core
  • All missing AS components that did not make it to version 5.0 is not included. This is not true for outdated and removed components.
  • The administrative interface, including edit templates, is now supported by the caching engine within .NET
• Security enhancements
  • Support for restriction of file types per category.
    Restrict what type of file (based on its extension) that can be stored in a category. For example you now can set that a category only can contain PDF-documents and Word-documents or that a category only can contain user controls (.ascx - files). As in earlier versions, the global right to write code is required to write any server side code or upload any file that can be executed on the server side such as ASP or ASPX files. 
  • EPT document file extension now defaults to .ept. 
    In Windows Server 2003, By changing the file extension for EPT documents to .ept you can prevent the EPT document content to be displayed in clear text even if there is no presentation template connected to it or if the underlying file name should be known. The Web server in Windows Server 2003 and later will ignore this file extension. It is possible to use the old .xml extension but we recommend this to be avoided.
  • Built-in support for cookie encryption, thus making sensitive data unreadable off site.