Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I got asked for help with an issue in some QA test the other day, and it struck me as a fun one that others might encounter. A nice little side effect of how literal computers can be...
Sometimes it's the simplest things that can trip up development work. A case in point is a bug ticket I got handed recently, which I think shows the need to understand your tools when writing code. Read on to avoid an interesting mistake with code flow in Razor views...
I was doing some investigation into moving some Experience Forms UI over to the new SaaS Forms in XM Cloud recently, and bumped into an interesting issue. If you're looking to make use of this new tool you may find this an interesting read:
A while back, work moved from having a traditional domain-joined laptops and an on-site Domain Controller for our Active Directory to the more modern SaaS model of cloud domain. Mostly this doesn't matter at all to employees as they work. But I bumped into one place where I do need to do something different because of this: setting explict disk permissions. So as a reminder to myself for next time, here's how to achieve this.
I've been tinkering with some pipeline modules for the Statiq generation engine that I use to render this blog, and I bumped into a fun mistake in my code which confused me for a while. To help me next time I'm doing this sort of modification, this seemed worth documenting - even if it is a bit of a silly mistake...
A common but not-fun issue for working developers is when you do some work, test it locally, submit a PR and then find that it blows up on someone else's computer. I'm not too proud to admit that I had an issue with this recently, which highlights a thing you have to remember when working with Sitecore Content Serialisation.
One of the fun things about defining objects and their APIs in C# is thinking about which bits you want your consumers to see, and which bits need to be there just for you, and consumers should avoid using. Most developers are aware of keywords like
public
/
private
and
internal
for achieving this, but Explicit Interfaces are another approach to this...
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?
I was tinkering with some some code that could post to BlueSky recently, and it took me a couple of goes to make the process of submitting a message with an image work. So in case it's of any use to anyone else, here's one way it can work:
Having been in development for a long time I've come across a lot of headscratching odd behaviour in code. Those issus have lead to a fair few conversations where people have looked at the odd behaviour and asked "is it a compiler/runtime bug?". And in all these years it never has been that sort of bug. But for the first time I have recently found a situation where some odd behaviour is C#'s fault...
So here's some info about the issue I saw this time, and what Microsoft are fixing as a result:
