Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
There's been a bit of discussion (I might even go as far as to say ranting 😉 ) on the subject of not using "fast query" in your website code recently. I'm a supporter of this idea – but I came across an issue recently that points out why it's not always easy to be confident that you're not making use of it indirectly...
So, for the benefit of Google:
So while battling the jetlag that hit me pretty hard getting back from Sitecore Symposium, this issue came popped up in my bug queue last week. QA reported that a certain component on a test page was not allowing one field to be edited. It had worked in the past, but the behaviour suddenly changed so that one field no longer got the "you can edit this" overlay in Experience Editor. It took me longer than it should have to work out why...
I did a talk about measuring site performance at Sitecore Symposium this year. It seemed to go pretty well, I think:
So Sitecore Sitecore Symposium**1 is very nearly upon us again. And this year (for the first time!) I'll be presenting a session. [Unless it gets moved again: Day 2 (Tuesday 9th), 16:15 in Swan 2 – "Measure if you want to go faster" – A developer's introduction to improving performance by measuring your code**2 ]
When this year's speakers first found out that their talk abstracts had been accepted, there was a bit of discussion on the Sitecore Slack about things speakers might want to know or do. And I've been meaning to write this up for a while, because there were quite a few things I saw that were worth sharing to help anyone else who's looking forward to their first opportunity to speak...
Here's a quick memory jogger for me: If you try to validate the AMP versions of blog pages, you may get this error from Google:
Invalid URL for HTML attribute 'href' in tag 'a'. What does it actually mean?
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:
