Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Symposium is over for another year. I have mostly recovered from the jet-lag now and I've wrestled my inbox into submission at work. So it's time to write up my thoughts on the conference. I took about 35 pages of notes over the course of the week, plus countless photos of slides. So from all that what stuck out as interesting to me?
I did a little proof-of-concept hacking recently around the idea of "what's the least work required to allow your existing Sitecore website public login to move to Entra". I ended up with the bones of an interesting approach, which might be of interest to others. So read on for ideas:
I quite often clone Sitecore's Docker Examples repo and spin up a Sitecore instance to experiment with. It's a quick way to create a disposable site which I can easily configure and deploy little bits of test code to. But recently I did this and noticed some odd warnings. So here's what happened and why, to help you avoid the same issue...
Having sorted out my travel plans for this October's Symposium and MVP Summit in Nashville, I've been having a think about what sessions I'd like to go and see. Here's a summary of my thoughts so far...
I was having a chat recently about alternatives to
Postman
if you needed to send HTTP requests to arbitrary web endpoints. I mentioned using Visual Studio's support for
.http
files for this during that discussion, and then found myself trying it out for some work too. But it seems there's a couple of tricky little bugs hiding in here, which tripped me up when I tried to set up a call to one of Sitecore's XM Cloud GraphQL endpoints.
As developers we often need to move data between SQL Server instances. Some of the time database backups are fine for this, because you want to move everything. But on occasion what you need is a SQL script which can insert some rows of data you had on another server for you. And when I find myself needing this feature, I also find myself having to google how to do it. So to help my memory, here's how to generate scripts for your data:
Recently I added a basic search page to my blog. This is a pure static site, hosted on Github Pages, so there's no Solr or Algolia here. Just some clever JavaScript (Lunr.js) acting on data generated by Statiq. Setting that up made me think about the internals of how a search can work efficiently, and I figured others might be interested in this...
Data Template inheritance. Most of the time it's great and a powerful tool to help you define your content schema effectively. But there are a few places where it can trip you up - and one of the interesting ones is duplicated field names. I found myself chatting about what actually happens and how this might affect PowerShell scripts and headless code recently, and it seemed worth writing down...
I've written a few times before about trying to smooth out the rougher edges of the process of blogging with some custom tooling. Both the site generator I'm using these days, and the simple editor tool I hacked together to suit my writing process. I realised recently that one of those rough edges that remained in the process was the need to manually commit my writing to source control, so I wondered what it might take to wire that into my editing tool...
I had a moment of frustration recently, when I spent a while looking for a Data Template in a particular Sitecore site and couldn't find it because a previous developer had set a Display Name. As a result of moaning about this Corey Smith reminded me of a way I could have helped myself here, and it seemed like something to share...
