Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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...
Recently I got the opportunity to do Sitecore's "Implementing Experience Commerce" training course, and get certified in the details of how Commerce works these days. While I was doing the lab exercises for the course I hit an interesting bug, which seemed like just the sort of thing that others might encounter.
So if you're extending the Commerce OData APIs, watch out:
I got a fun support ticket recently, for a client on Sitecore v8.1 whose analytics processing had stopped working. Their outstanding queue of raw analytics data that needed to be aggregated was slowly growing, and some functionality which relied on the existence of recent analyics data had stopped working. Trying to fix this caused me to look at two issues which are related to how Web Forms for Marketers data is processed in analytics – and these seemed like issues that other people who do support work might need info on...
Recently Steve McGill asked me if I'd tried using SIF's certificate creation when automating Solr setup for Sitecore. I realised I'd not put any effort into how this might work – and that seemed like an excellent excuse for some research...
A while back I wrote a couple of posts on the subject of how code pipelines can work in a more functional .Net world. I've made use of those patterns in some code of my own, and I've found these posts have generated quite a lot of questions from readers here and followers on twitter. But I've never been quite happy with the implementation in my own code...
