Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I presented a session at the London and Manchester user groups recently, where I talked about what I needed to do in order to get started developing Sitecore code under Docker.
One of the minor annoyances of some XM releases of Sitecore is that rather than just disabling analytics and not running xConnect, they do not include the DLLs necessary for personalisation at all. That can be a bit of a pain sometimes – as I discovered recently when I tried to deploy some client code into an XM docker container. The site broke because the client code included references to a personalisation DLL – which made me realise I actually wanted an "XP in XM mode" container so I didn't need to bother with the memory and CPU for xConnect. So here's how I hacked one up...
The approach I read on how to "how to attach your debugger to Sitecore inside Docker" by running
docker inspect
to fetch the current IP address, and pasting it into Visual Studio can be a bit of a faff. So I got to wondering: Are there other ways to achieve the same result?
Because of the old maxim "anything you do more than once should be automated", we all find ourselves working with tools to auto-generate projects and solutions for Helix architecture these days. Mostly these tools work fine – but every so often you can bump your head against unexpected behaviour – as I did recently:
Having started down the Docker road, I hit an interesting issue the other day. How do you get Sitecore to generate absolute links correctly when your site runs inside a container?
There's been a lot of movement towards "Docker for Sitecore" over the last year – to the extent that even I have finally jumped onto the bandwagon. And with any new tech, there are some rough edges to contend with. Right now (for me at least) one of those is being able to get the right Docker images built for the bit of work you need to do. In the future (crosses fingers) we'll see Sitecore offering a repo for these images – but for now it's up to us to build our own. So if you need something that's not v9.3, here's what I did to get there:
I'll be honest – I don't do much front-end stuff. I've watched the odd PluralSight course on modern JavaScript, I've worked out the basics of Gulp, and I can hack together a VueJS UI if I need to. But it's certainly not something I'd ever say I was good at. But despite being offically a C# developer, occasionally I find myself looking at bug tickets that relate to some front-end code. I had one of them this week, where some javascript had stopped working. The front-end dev was stuck, so I took a look – and discovered something new. Well new to me at least...
I am no DBA. In fact I'm happy to admit that I know just enough SQL to be dangerous. So when database problems come up, they can be tricky. I recently helped a client work through an issue with analytics databases, which wasn't easy to google – so it's time to help future developers find it...
While developers would love to avoid ever writing documentation or reports, it happens to us all. One of the most frustrating bits of this can be getting the formatting to work as you'd like in Word – and I got bitten by this recently. So, as a memory jogger for my future self, here's how to deal with misbehaving heading numbers:
With the big news from Symposium being the start of Sitecore's move towards the SaaS market, it's interesting to have a think about what that means for us developers and architects in the medium to long term. Because it seems likely there's going to be quite a bit of change for us...
