High Score Labs News   •   Nov 19, 2019

Ever wonder what EPI server development might look like? Fortunately, there are no complicated sign-ups for temp developer licenses required! It is pretty simple to take it for a test drive and this article with give you 5 simple steps to get going quickly! NOTE: this walkthrough was done using visual studio 2019 and using windows 10

Step One: Open Visual Studio on your windows machine

Step Two: Click on ‘extensions’, then ‘online’ and search for ‘episerver’.

Click on the extension and install it. It will require that you close visual studio for the extension to install. When the install is complete, reopen visual studio and create a new solution. You will now have a new episerver template that you can use. Select it

Step Three: For the purposes of taking episerver for a spin, we can select the ‘alloy (mvc)’ and ‘episerver find’.

This is a fully prebuilt solution that effectively demonstrates episerver code practices and a built-out brochure-ware web site

Step Four: Your project will now be built. This is an excellent way to learn episerver since all the basics have been covered in code and it only takes a little bit of time to read through it (or step through) to figure out the basic mechanics. It is very similar to normal .Net MVC development and therefore has a lower learning curve than other platforms (i.e., Sitecore)

Final Step: Click run in visual studio (or the keyboard) as there is no need to install SQL server and IIS on your dev machine. There will be a screen where you create your login.

Once completed, you will now see the demo Alloy site. Click the episerver button at the top right and you will be able to switch between edit and admin modes, have fun!

This was a quick demonstration of how easy it is to get episerver up and running. You will find that the learning curve is much lower than other platforms as well. In future articles (and videos) we will look at some of the features that set episerver apart from the rest!