Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
An issue that crops up fairly often in web agency work is that you have to work on code for older versions of Sitecore. Most of the time this is fine, but sometimes in between the Sitecore version getting released and you doing this work, stuff changes in Windows that makes this setup harder than it should be... This has been a challenge recently as some of my fellow developers now have Windows 11 on their laptops, and they're having to work on Sitecore 10.2 projects. And out of the box, SIF or SIA won't install in that scenario these days. Having had to help a couple of people with these issues recently, I figured it might be worth automating the fixes with some Powershell, so it's easier in the future. And maybe that automation might help you?
In a previous post I looked at how you can customise schema for Products in the Product Content Management feature of Content Hub. But getting data in is only half the story - how can we go about getting it back out for use elsewhere in our tech ecosystem? Well the answer is a fun combination of GraphQL and how Content Hub can serve images. Read on for my notes on one approach on configuring all of this:
There was a lot going on at SUGCON EU in Antwerp last week. A lot of great community content, the usual fun bar/corridor conversations with other attendees, and plenty of (way too much?) food. But I want to single out some of the announcements Sitecore made in their keynotes and sessions, because there's some really important stuff there for our future work on the platform.
Content Hub is a product I don't get to use too often, so I find myself digging about a bit to remember the details of some customisation and setup. So having had to do some investigations into how to customise the Product Content Management features recently I figured both myself and search engines might benefit from some notes on the subject for the future. And maybe you will too...
I've written a few things about diagnosing memory issues in Sitecore over the years, but one topic I've not covered in detail is anything around "how to spot when it's not piles of your own objects that's causing the issue". Problems like leaking handles can have an obvious link back to the custom code that you can spot fairly easily in diagnostic data. But not all memory issues do. I was discussing a possible example of this with a colleague recently, and it seemed like another thing to write down...
When I was writing about dealing with memory analysis for Sitecore recently I focused on a site running under Auzre PaaS. But what if you're working in Docker locally? A good question it turns out...
Recently I got a fun question from a fellow dev: After pulling some changes and doing a sync of serialised data they were expecting to see some forms in the Experience Forms editor so they could work on them. But nothing was showing up... The root cause here is a bit of a classic issue that many people will have seen before, but it still seemed worth writing it up. Even if just to emphasise that this has been around for a while and it's still a thing even if you're using containers.
I wrote about diagnosing some issues with static event bindings in a previous post, and talked about finding these issues of "subscribing more than you unsubscribe" with memory dumps. But finding this sort of a problem before it becomes an issue is better if you can, so what techniques might we use for that?
A while back I wrote a bit about how you might integrate Extra External ID with Sitecore to provide a very minimal IDAM integration for login. But in the follow-ups to the internal discussions that gave me the idea for that post, my project started talking about alternatives to Entra. So what might you be able to do if you chose Ping Identity instead?
After my recent delve into memory optimisation for non-work code, I spent some time recently investigating a memory issue in a production Sitecore site. The outcome of that was an issue which can be a common problem for .Net code. So in the hope of seeing it less in the future, here are some notes on what I saw and how you can avoid the same trap...
