Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I've written a few times before about trying to smooth out the rougher edges of the process of blogging with some custom tooling. Both the site generator I'm using these days, and the simple editor tool I hacked together to suit my writing process. I realised recently that one of those rough edges that remained in the process was the need to manually commit my writing to source control, so I wondered what it might take to wire that into my editing tool...
I had a moment of frustration recently, when I spent a while looking for a Data Template in a particular Sitecore site and couldn't find it because a previous developer had set a Display Name. As a result of moaning about this Corey Smith reminded me of a way I could have helped myself here, and it seemed like something to share...
A while back I wrote about the transition from T4 templates to using Roslyn Source Generators for generating code in .Net Core solutions. While that worked for me, and I was able to get it to do what I needed, I was never really happy with all the output source as literal strings in the generator code. Recently I had another potential use for generated code, so I decided to try and fix this issue...
A very long time ago I managed a server with some websites on it. So long ago, in fact, that this "cutting edge" deployment was on Windows 2000 Server. I made a virtual machine backup of this server at the time, burned the files onto a DVD and filed this away in case I ever needed it. And recently I had reason to want some data off this ancient machine. I was able to get it fired up, but it took a little effort to get there. It feels like a minor miracle that I was able to make this run, so I wanted to write down some of the things I messed about with - partly so I'll remember if I ever have to do something similar again, and partly because this might be of interest to (a small number of) others too...
There are some days when technology just doesn't want to play ball. And in my experience 99% of these days are when you're on a developer training course and its the exercise/labs machine that's being difficult. I had this recently on the XM Cloud developer intro course. I've no idea if anyone else would ever see this issue (or how it was caused) but it didn't return much useful info in Google, and I did find a way to fix for my problem. So it's documentation time...
It struck me recently that there are a few places in this blog where I linked to pages I know will disappear over time. The examples that started me thinking about this were the Symposium and SUGCON websites that get published each year. They tend to reuse the same domain names from year to year without archiving the old content. So those links go stale fairly quickly, and posts from years back now point to this year's events by default. So I started wondering if I could fix this issue automatically...
Just because stuff is "old" doesn't mean it's not interesting... I found myself having a discussion with a colleague recently about the state management patterns that Sitecore uses for things like
SecurityDisabler
and how they work in the ASP.Net pipeline. It's not new tech, but it is an interesting pattern which you might find uses for outside your XP implementations...
The other week I got the chance to do a talk for the Manchester user group in the UK about the what & why of Sitecore's Accelerate program. It seemed like a topic that was worth summarising here as well, for people who prefer to read their info rather than watch it...
Earlier this week, I got my first chance to take a look at the agenda for this year's SUGCON EU**1 (in Dublin next month), and a few things jumped out for me as things I probably want to watch at the event. Maybe they'd be of interest to you too?
Sometimes things you think you know turn out not to be right. I got bitten by this issue recently, and it seemed like something to write down. Because being wrong is fine, as long as you learn something...
