Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
The rate of change of stuff in the Sitecore is exciting for working in the ecosystem. But a challenge is that things sometimes move faster than the clear documentation. A project I'm involved with bumped into an issue here recently, which seemed worth writing down to (hopefully) help others.
I came across a fascinating bug the other day. Some code that involved parsing dates from incoming text had passed testing, but when running on a live server it failed. But not consistently - some dates continued to parse fine, but others would cause errors. The answer was... not what I expected. So maybe some of you might want to be aware of this too:
If you're creating custom Entities in Content Hub then you're likely going to be setting up some fields which relate to image assets. There is a default picker for these relation fields, but it's not a great editorial experience most of the time. So having worked through how to set up something better, I'm writing it down as a crib-sheet for myself next time. And maybe it will help you too...
I often find myself building little .Net tools to help me with repetitive jobs. And fairly often these need some config data to drive their behaviour. If I have a tool that runs on my home server as a Scheduled Task then providing a way to edit that config remotely can be important. A web app is one way of solving this problem - but it tends to be fairly high effort. Remoting to the server is another, but network security can make that a challenge. So an alternative solution is to expose the config file via WebDAV so that a simple remote tool can use HTTP protocols to edit it. Here's a basic example of setting that up...
I have a complicated relationship with WPF. When you know what you're doing, it's great for building desktop apps. It's much easier to handle scenarios like apps getting used across varying DPIs, or doing complex UI layouts. But there are a few bits of it which, when you don't know how to do them, aren't intuitive. I bumped into another one the other day: Needing to trigger an animation on-demand. And so I can remember this next time I need to do this, here's a quick write-up of one way to achieve it...
When you have an entity that moves through a State Flow in Content Hub you may well want users to be able to see at a glance where things are in that flow. So here's one way you might set that up to give a nice visual representation in your listings for the entity:
The pace of change with .Net is pretty relentless these days. And every so often they ship a thing that fixes a challenge I've been mulling over addressing myself. That's happened again with Process API changes in preview 4 of .Net 11. So if you have code which spawns other executables, you might want to look at what they've changed...
I've been spending some time setting up some custom Entities in Content Hub recently. I bumped up against an issue with one feature where it took me a while to find the right info to make it work the way I wanted.
I spoke recently at the London user group, talking about a scenario where you might use Content Hub to help you with OrderCloud projects. Since that presentation didn't get recorded I thought I should write some notes on the core bits of what I said, as this is probably of interest to a wider audience...
I found a fun new variation on the "Windows Server Essentials client can be tricky to install" problems I've had in the past recently. To help me remember for next time, here's the issue I saw this time...
