Enterprise Episerver: VB.NET Public Templates for Visual Studio

The easy way to start with Episerver is check, or even reuse, the public templates on your project. But wait! What if you're a Visual Basic .NET fan?

Well, Marcelo, one of my colleagues here at Oshyn already walked you through the process of Creating an Episerver VB Site from Visual Studio to mimic the C# one created using the Visual Studio project type installed by EPiServer.

But if you actually installed the sample site and want to build your own on top of it, well, here I give you the public templates ported to VB.NET. First things first, instructions:

• This is based on an installation of EPiServer 5 R2 (5.2.375.236) running on port 80 where the public templates for English had been installed (Swedish or Globalized content should not pose a problem).
• The zip file contains the Visual Studio 2008 project for VB, just unzip in a suitable location, create a new website in IIS pointing to it (all other sites must be stopped). I don't recommend replacing the C# files with these ones (there's no need for that) both can co-exist and you can switch between them just by stop/start IIS sites.
• Open the project with Visual Studio, modify connectionStrings.config to match your database (you can open the C# matching file for a hint).
• Modify Web.config to set the VPP directories, there are three entries, just seach for VPP and you'll find them (again, check the C# Web.config if you need to find out where's your VPP path)
• Start the site, go to localhost in a browser and now you're looking at the sample project from VB.NET!

The VB.NET project tree and homepage inside Visual Studio

There's a chance you will see missing images in the site now, something that didn't happen in the C# project; don't panic, it's an IIS issue.