Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
not difficult to make mistakes in how you set up your site that lead to difficult to diagnose failures in the WYSIWYG editor. I came across one such issue recently that seemed like just the sort of thing Google needs to know about to save future developers (and probably Future Me as well) from the pain of debugging it.
As time goes on, something I've noticed is that as Sitecore evolves it is taking a greater reliance on search integration – making things like Solr ever more important. And that leads to an exciting new set of issues you come across if, for some reason, your search service is not available.
I wasted some perfectly good development time recently when some of my renderings vanished from published pages, thanks to this.
Quick one today. I was writing some code for Sitecore Computed Index fields recently, and it took me more Google Effort than I felt it should have to work out how to write unit tests with FakeDB to verify the code worked. If you want to do that without spending a while searching, the answer is pleasingly simple:
Ages ago I wrote myself some notes on setting up Windows Server Essentials on Intel NUC hardware. Recently I did an upgrade on one of these machines, and ended up in a world of pain. Google was very thin on information to help me try and sort this out, so I figured this needed writing up...
Continuing my voyage of obscure-error-discovery around Sitecore 9, this week SIF has been putting a lot of red into console windows for me. I'm not sure how many people will have this scenario, but if you have multiple people who all need to install their own Sitecore 9 instance onto one machine, this may be of interest:
I'm working on my first proper Sitecore 9 project at the moment, and got bitten by an annoying bit of confusion while doing some configuration work. If you're tweaking how xConnect works take note, and hopefully you can avoid making the same mistake I did...
Every so often I run up against an issue that's right there in the docs, but somehow has passed me by. This week that issue was Sitecore's new V9 forms implementation, and it's relationship with languages...
Recently I wrote about an issue I encountered where a client's website was missing its GeoIP data (and the related back-end analytics data) entirely. While the changes discussed in that post solved the problem of there being no MongoDB data for GeoIP lookups at all, I continued to see odd issues with many users not being located after those fixes were made. Sorting this out seems to suggest that some of the "common wisdom" about configuring GeoIP for analytics isn't right – so here are my latest findings:
Recently a colleague of mine told me about a suggestion they'd been given about setting up an instance of Sitecore. They were told that you should put your license file into a subfolder of your data directory because the license check enumerates files and folders in the directory containing the file. So if the folder contained other things, this would slow down the check. This sounded odd to me as you have to specify the exact path of the license in your config, so I thought I'd do some investigating, and see if I could prove or disprove the suggestion.
So, putting on my best beret at a jaunty "for science!" angle, here's what I discovered:
Every so often I come across the need for some simple code to schedule a bit of work in the background of an application. Sometimes because a service (for integration tasks, perhaps) needs to kick off processing every so often, or sometimes because some background part of a larger program needs to happen in parallel with the main execution. A common part of these requirements is that the task should run every so often, but two instances of the task should not overlap no matter how long the background processing takes.
A few times I've come across projects with subtly broken implementations of this requirement, so I thought I'd write down a simple approach that has worked for me. That way next time I need it, I won't have to go digging through git repos...
