Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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...
I got the chance to speak at the Manchester Sitecore user group recently, introducing some tools and tricks that can be used to measure site performance while you're developing your Sitecore code. For anyone who wasn't there (and those who were but, want to refer back to what I said) here's a summary of the important bits of content from that talk...
I spent some time working with some code recently, which had some annoying habits of failing oddly in scenarios where nulls got passed into constructors. While I was trying to work around some of these issues, it struck me that tests for parameter handling for constructors are one of those annoying things that tend to make unit testing frustrating. They're annoying boiler-plate to write if you need them, and then a constructor signature changes, you end up with a lot of make-work test changes to do.
So as an exercise in "learning something new", wondered whether I could automate them in a reasonable way...
