Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I've been looking at some information architecture stuff for OrderCloud recently, and came across a situation where "groups" were suggested as helpful for the business scenario I needed to model. There didn't seem to be a great deal of documentation about why you might want them for things like this, so I figured it might help others for me to write down what I was looking at. And why groups might be the right answer for you too...
A colleague showed me something I'd not seen before about Azure DevOps wikis the other day, which kind of blew my mind. If you've not realised this either, maybe it can blow yours too...
If you're experimenting with OrderCloud then getting a sandbox instance is an important part of the discovery process. Unlike most of Sitecore's products, this one is available free to anyone (just register in the portal) - so it's easy to give it a try. But if you want to build an experiment against the sandbox instance you need your code to authenticate with it. And this has tripped me up a couple of times because it's not wildly well documented. So learn from my frustration...
Have you thought about attending SUGCON EU this year? We're getting close to the community's big annual get-together which is being held in London this year. And as ever it has a very interesting looking agenda. Still thinking whether you should attend? Here's a few of the reasons why I'll be there...
I've been working with C# most of my career, but every so often they add bits to the language which for some reason I've never really got to make use of. And "covariance" is one of those things. But I picked up a beta copy of a great new book recently (Eric Lippert's "Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms" from Manning) and it had a simple but fascinating example of a situation where this can work. It taught me something that maybe you might find interesting too...
I've been looking at some work related to Content Types in Content Hub recently, and while this is a bit like Data Templates in the good old DXP, I had a couple of things I had to spend time researching as part of this work. So maybe if you're looking at using the CMP features, this might help you understand a couple of quirks too...
Following on from the general framework bits in the previous posts about building a text adventure, what needs doing to create an example game? Here's an explanation of the example repo game to show how it all goes together. [ Spoiler warning - if you want the fun of playing the example game, don't read this post before you play, as it explains some of the puzzles.]
Last time up we created the very basics of a text adventure where we could look at rooms in the world, and had a way to provide other commands like movement or picking stuff up. So what can we do to let the world react to the user's actions, and create puzzles and atmosphere for a game? Step forward behaviours...
The world model from the previous post is all well and good, but the player needs to be able to interact with it. What do we need to add to allow that? Well we need an abstraction for the things the game is going to allow the player to do.
I've had a few days to decompress and think about all the stuff I heard from the various stages at this year's Sitecore Symposium in Orlando. So here's a rundown of the key messages for me, from my viewpoint as a developer and architect in the Sitecore space.
