Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
With the release of Sitecore 8.2 Update 1 last week, we finally have support for running our Sitecore solutions as Azure Web App Services without the need for the Sitecore Azure Module. As someone who had never tried a PaaS deployment with the old module, this brings a load of interesting benefits, but also has a few challenges to get your head around. I've spent a bit of time experimenting, and discovered a few things that you might want to read up on before you dive in.
Every website needs to be able to deal with requests for pages which don't exist – some sort of 404 handling is a feature of pretty much every Sitecore project. But, as I discovered when sorting out an issue on a client's site recently, it's a bit of code which can bite if you're not careful...
The other week I mentioned I'd suffered a hard drive failure on my laptop. Other than the git issues I wrote about last time, I had another issue that seemed worth writing up: How to get all of the user data for the rebuilt install on a separate drive to the programs and operating system. If that's something you might want to do with a Windows install then read on...
Recently the hard drive in my trusty old laptop failed. Annoying, but ultimately it was just an excuse to go shopping, ignore most of my backup of the old machine and re-install all my programs from scratch. As part of that I decided that I'd try experimenting with the latest pre-release version of Visual Studio 15, to see if it was stable enough for me to use for my personal projects and blog coding now.
So having worked out how you re-install a "free upgrade from Win7" copy of Windows 10 and gone through through Visual Studio's new installer, I tried to clone some code from my private git server. Having been greeted with some cryptic errors, I've spent some time working out how to resolve the issue. So as ever, I'm writing it all down in case it's of help to others...
In my last post I was thinking about a more functional approach to defining pipelines, after having heard about some interesting new code that Sitecore had been working on. Since writing that I've had a few conversations where the topic "but what about if I want a pipeline to come from configuration?" has come up. I've been away from work for the last week doing my civic duty on Jury Service, but I've had some time in between court sessions that I've spent thinking about how last weeks ideas and configuration files might be combined.
So here's one way it could work:
There was a lot of exciting new stuff on show at the Sitecore's recent MVP Summit and Symposium the other week. Plenty of others have written up the general goings on at those events (have a google – there's lots to read), so I thought I'd focus on something more specific that piqued my interest: the novel approach that's being taken to pipelines in some of the new code Sitecore are producing.
One of the things that the masters of Unit Testing say is that tests should always be repeatable and deterministic. No matter when, or how many times you run a test, if the System Under Test stays the same, the results of the test should stay the same. So I found myself a bit confused recently when some tests went from reliable to unreliable results. Turns out the tests were right, and they were pointing out a silly bug I'd introduced by accident...
Wild times in the Sitecore world, as the release of v8.2 is has brought a load of new features. One I'm particularly pleased about is that there is now an official NuGet feed for your Sitecore references. I've been asking pretty much every Sitecore employee I've spoken to about doing this for years now, and finally it's here.
So now I've read the release notes and finished a quick chair dance of joy, it's time to dive in and see what it's all about...
Following on from last week's "how to host private NuGet feeds in Visual Studio Online", this week we'll build on that to get some code to compile and some Sitecore.FakeDB tests to run and Hedgehog TDS to generate a deployment package in the cloud build.
While I've read plenty of articles in the past about configuring build servers for Sitecore projects, I've not seen much written about using Visual Studio Online. (Or "Team Foundation Services", or whatever it's called this week) Since the company I work for are in the process of transitioning all their development infrastructure to Azure, trying to get hosted builds working in VSO seemed like a userful area of research for me. This is the first part of what will probably turn into a few posts on the topic of how I got to the point of being able to run a hosted build for a Sitecore / TDS / FakeDB solution...
