Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Following on from my recent post about how I was able to mess up my life by getting Marketing Automation connection strings wrong, I hit another interesting issue with MA – this time around content languages...
I had another of my fun chats with Sitecore Support recently, for an issue that seemed to get no useful results in Google when I looked. So, as is my way, I'm filling that search-engine void today. This turned out to be entirely my fault – but it seems like the sort of mistake that others might encounter too... So if you've deployed a distributed instance of Sitecore and found Marketing Automation was behaving oddly, read on...
I hit an interesting issue recently: Some code that worked fine on a QA instance of Sitecore had been deployed for UAT and was now failing with an odd error message. Whilst this issue was entirely our fault, there wasn't much in Google about the error messages I was seeing, so I'm trying to correct that problem today...
I've been looking at adjusting SIF scripts for a production deployment recently, and realised that sometimes you'd like SIF to generate random passwords for you, but you need them logged so you can reuse them in scripts you're crafting for other roles. It doesn't do that out of the box, but it turns out it's actually quite simple:
I was asked to do some configuration on a remote computer recently, and discovered that the security-concious network admins had locked down the ability for me to share my local computer's files with the server via RDP and the ability to get to services like OneDrive. I had a collection of config files I had been asked to deploy, and manually creating each file on the server and copying over its contents seemed like a lot of hassle. So I tried a trick with PowerShell to make my life easier...
One of the projects I'm working on at the moment came with a requirement to change Sitecore v9.1 from running with the default SQL Security accounts to trusted connections using specific Active Directory accounts that the client provided. While there's a bit of work to do to enable this, it shouldn't be too tough. But trying to be a bit clever, I hit upon an issue which seemed worth documenting...
A couple of times recently, I've found myself needing to deploy files that come wrapped in a
.tar.gz
archive onto servers. On your desktop that's not too much of a problem – you just run the installer for your preferred
3rd party tool, or maybe
use the new Unixy shell
and you get on with it. But on client servers security can be higher and you don't always get the option to run any old installer. So I needed an alternative...
I've been using VS2019 for all my personal development work pretty much since the first preview came out. For general coding and debugging it's been good so far – stable, and effective. And little things like git stash control from the UI make me happy... It got its full release recently, just before I spoke at SUGCON 2019 – where I said I'd blog something about how 2019 changed the performance measurement stuff that I was presenting. Having done some tests in the last few days, it's not looking so shiny any more...
Sometimes the learning point from working on a misbehaving Sitecore server isn't related to the CMS. Recently I learned something useful about Excel while I was addressing some other issues. Not sure if this is "so trivially simple I'm just the last one to realise" or whether it's a really useful bit of trivia – but just because someone else might benefit:
If you missed my session at SUGCON this year, or if you were there but want to go back over something I said, don't worry: The slides and a transcript of what I was saying are available here...
