Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Outside of work I've been looking for non-Sitecore things to experiement with recently, and my eye was caught by a bit of interesting game development technology. I came across a discussion of using code to generate game data with a technique called "Wavefunction Collapse". It's a simple concept, but it has some interesting results, so I thought I'd have a go at an implementation myself.
If you're looking for the simplest possible developer setup for Sitecore then creating an ASP.Net web project, dropping Sitecore over the top, configuring it for shared databases and checking it in to source control is the answer. Back in the day it was an accepted pattern to to work this way – so you could click "play" in Visual Studio to run your site. And I still find myself workig on projects running that way. But today this is considered a bad idea. So why do I keep finding projects set up this way, and why isn't it a good approach?
After I presented at a couple of user groups recently, some people asked me about how I organised the video demos in my deck. It's a question I've been asked a few times over the years, so I figured this might be a good time to answer it...
...it's easy to get your fingers burned. I was looking at an issue with personalisation recently, which reminded me that those little details in the docs, which change between versions can often be the most important ones.
Recently, I caught sight of a discussion in Sitecore Slack where the lack of tooling for helping you build config patch files came up. For some reason that struck a chord with me, and having mulled over it a bit, I decided I'd have a go at making something to see if it could be done...
My moment of confusion from a while back came in the middle of a big chunk of client development work. The solution already used the generator-helix package, but the work needed to make use of TDS, rather than Unicorn. Since I was going to be involved in creating a set of new features, and potentially a load of TDS projects, I wondered what it would take to make the generator-helix package support TDS...
Symposium 2019 seems a loooong time ago now – but it was only last November. Back then, I did a session on understanding the basics of Solr and SolrCloud to help Sitecore developers with their production deployments.
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?
