Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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...
A colleague of mine has been looking at some custom page events and reporting in Sitecore 8.1 recently. One thing which came to light during this work is that some of the personalisation rule code in the product didn't appear to work as expected. In case anyone else is looking at this aspect of the software, he's a summary of the issue we were seeing, in the hope that it can help you avoid the time we spent looking into this:
Sitecore config patches are great, right? We (should) all be using them to ensure that our changes in configuration don't get stomped on when we upgrade, or install new modules. But like any bit of technology, they can sometimes cause problems. Here's an example of one I saw recently, in the hope it can save others from similar issues:
Every so often, every developer finds themselves having to parse data out of text. There are loads of ways of approaching this task, but a lot of pretty unsatisfactory solutions start from "I'll just split up the text by whitespace" or "Hey, let's use regular expressions!". You all remember what regular expressions lead to, right?
As someone who's always on the lookout for something interesting and new to experiment with, I came across an alternative approach to parsing text recently. A blog post I read (I forget what it was, or I'd give credit) linked to the Sprache project on GitHub. This is a text parsing library which lets you construct the descriptions of the text to parse using Linq-style expressions.
So I thought I'd invent an idea for an experimental project to test this out...
Recently I was looking into how custom caching might improve the performance of Layouts in Sitecore. But one important aspect of the concept of improving performance with tricks like that which I didn't discuss was how you can work out places where caching will give you benefits...
Most of the time when you need to cache things in Sitecore, it's handled for you with the built in frameworks for data and UI layer caches. Usually your problems are solved by tuning the sizes of the caches and configuring the right caching settings on your UI components. But what happens when you've got bits of data which you want to cache that are neither components or items?
