Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
News stories about hacking and malware are depressingly common these days. Here in the UK I think we've not really dealt with all the fall-out from last May when parts of our health service (along with many other businesses) were hit by the "Wannacry" ransomware worm. Yet another security incident happened the other day which will get less press coverage (since it's nowhere near as dramatic) but has bigger implications for us as web develelopers...
I find myself doing quite a lot of work on performance for Sitecore websites at the moment. Whenever I do a similar job for a group of clients, I start to spot patterns in the sites I'm working on – and it struck me that there are some common performance issues that can be spotted just from the overview graphs you see when you collect trace data.
So to try and help you all improve the sites you ship, here are three that I've come across in a few projects recently:
It's a pretty common requirement that deploying instances of Sitecore will require slightly different configuration on different servers. Different roles, like content management and content deployment, will require different settings and features to work. So it's not surprising that there are a variety of approaches to how you manage this configuration in your projects.
In the past I've often made use of separate config files, where you have a file for "config changes needed on all servers" and then further files for "config changes needed for CM servers", and even down to the level of "config changes needed on server CD01" if necessary. This works fine if your deployment process understands which files should go on which servers.
Recently, however, Sitecore have started to offer a "role based configuration" approach in the configuration of v9 – so you can deploy a single config file and the server can pick and choose sections of its configuration based on what role it is performing. But back in the real world, most of us are still supporting V8 (and older) sites, so is it possible for them to adopt something similar to this idea? Here's one approach that achieves something similar:
I've been doing some work with Release Management in Visual Studio Online recently. Overall it's been a pretty positive experience, but there was one face-palm inducing moment I came across which needs writing down so I don't fall into the same trap next time I have to do this. When you're working with local release agents, you mustn't forget the security settings that your agent's server is configured with...
A challenge I've come across a number of times while working with PowerShell scripts for Sitecore is that scripts sometimes have other files they depend on. Making sure that your scripts and their dependencies stay in sync can be a challenge at times, especally when scripts get reused across an organisation. So what approaches can you use for this?
My first time having to configure Solr for Sitecore recently taught me a variety of new things. (I know – how have I managed to avoid it this long?) Most of the basics of the setup have been well documented elsewhere, so I won't repeat any of that. However setting up the site to use the Ninject DI container wasn't as smooth as the documentation suggested, so here are some notes on the issues I hit in case you find yourself stuck:
There's been a bit of a theme in my recent posts about scripting stuff, and that continues this week. I've been looking at some ideas for automating tasks for developers recently, and one of the things I was interested in was being able to get stuff downloaded from dev.sitecore.net without having to do it manually. So, here's some PowerShell that can help you with that...
Last time out I was looking at scripting installs of Solr using plain old PowerShell. Since the Sitecore world is getting to grips with a new PowerShell based install approach with the Sitecore Install Framework (SIF), it seemed like a sensible idea to try porting my ideas to SIF so see how that would work...
I'm sure I've said before that any task you have to do more than once is worth automating. Well recently I've found myself needing to install Solr in a variety of places – so obviously my mind turned to automation. There are lots of ways this can be approached, and some people have already had a go at it for their own needs, but here's my take.
I've spent the last week or so working on the config changes necessary to migrate a client site running Sitecore v8.1 from using Lucene to Solr for its search infrastructure. I've not worked much with Solr before, so this has been a good opportunity for me to learn about how it works and how it gets configured. But when I deployed my changes from my local development environment to a central testing server I discovered some odd behavior which Google didn't help with. So, for the good of search indexes everywhere, here's what happened...
