Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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...
This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.
If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!
One of the interesting changes that's part of the coming release of Sitecore v9.3 is the integration of the Solr installation into the SIF scripts for developers. Given I've had a go at doing this myself in the past, I thought it would be interesting to look at their approach and see how it works...
A problem I've encountered a number of times in my Sitecore career is that when content trees are large and indexing tasks complex, it can take such a long time to perform a full rebuild of a search index that your web application can end up recycling for some reason before the build completes... Once content grows to this size, search can become quite difficult to manage, so I've been experimenting with a tool to help.
Having spent some time deploying instances of Java for Solr servers recently, I came across two things that wasted my time. So...
It's only a few weeks until Sitecore Symposium**1 kicks off for this year. My presentation is taking shape nicely (more of that later) but I've also been considering what I'll be watching from the rest of the conference... So if you're looking for inspiration, or still on the fence about buying yourself a ticket, here's what I'm looking forward to around this year's event:
Every so often pretty much every developer ends up in a situation where they're looking at a bug that manifests on one platform, but not on another. The sort of bug where you end up spending hours looking through log and config files for a subtle difference. I found myself looking into just this sort of bug recently, but on a site where (to my frustration) the config files were full of comments and whitespace differences across platforms that made diffing really hard ** . Spotting that subtle bug-causing difference is pretty much impossible when your diff is full of noise... So how can we fix that?
In theory, the magic of Dynamic Placeholders lets us have a container component placed onto your page more than once. That didn't work in the old world of "static" placeholders, because the rendering engine didn't like two placeholders with the same name. But despite it's benefits, the dynamic implementation has an annoying edge case – you may not be able to enable caching for your container component. I had a client bump into this issue recently, so I spent some time considering approaches that might help them address this issue.
