Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Every so often, the move from WebForms style projects to MVC ones throws up a challenging question. An issue which I came across recently, is how do you cope with a situation where two independent components on a page need to exchange data? In WebForms projects there we could connect them together via the Layout's Code Behind, and in front-end situations JavaScript can do a similar job for us. But the situation requires back-end code and we're using MVC it's a bit more of a challenge...
I've had a Raspberry Pi sitting under my desk for some time now, but things keep getting in the way of me doing much with it. But in honour of the whole "March is for Makers" thing, I decided I needed to finally do something more than boot it up and let my son tinker with Scratch on it. I'd also acquired a "Sense Hat" add-on recently, and something about the matrix display on that made me think of animated graphs. Now that the Windows 10 IoT build is gaining features, I thought I'd try installing that and building something that would let me graph website activity – with a view to how it might get connected to Sitecore...
Sometimes you find yourself investigating errors which are made more difficult to solve by the sheer weight of hits for a term out on the internet. Top of my list of things that are a pain to Google, is any sort of Stack Overflow exception. You can guess why, right? 😉 Having gone throught that pain recently, here's some notes on an issue I helped my colleagues diagnose recently which fell straight into that trap...
Having spent a bit of time recently looking at some of the new stuff included in the tools and frameworks for ASP.Net Core 1.0 and Sitecore's Habitat solution, one of the things that caught my eye is the Gulp task runner. So after a few days of poking around, here's a basic introduction for anyone else considering it for their Sitecore work.
I suspect a fairly common scenario for Sitecore developers is launching a new site which replaces an existing one with a shiny new design and content structure. It's a fairly common requirement of these projects that whoever is in charge of SEO will want redirects in place from important old URLs on the site, to new ones. They ensure that users who have bookmarks to the old pages don't see 404s, and try to keep the search engine rankings which had been acquired by the old site.
Another common scenario these days is for new websites to serve all of their pages under HTTPS, rather than just the "sensitive" pages as we might have done in the past.
When you combine these two needs together, you can end up with more complicated redirection rules than you might have needed in the past. If you're planning to make use of the the Url Redirect module from the Sitecore Marketplace, my experiences doing this might be of help to you:
It struck me the other day, that I've now been a full-time remote worker for more than ten years. As the technology for working away from company offices slowly gets better, I'd like to hope this approach to work was getting more common. After all, it has the potential to save companies money and it has the potential to give you back a couple of hours of your day that you don't need to spend commuting.
So just in case anyone else is thinking about trying working this way, I thought I'd have a go at setting out some of the challenges I've had to address over the last decade.
A while back I blogged about some of the issues of having Windows 10 computers using Windows Server Essentials as their backup target. Recently I installed the first major update for Windows 10, and this caused me more issues, which I figured I should document.
It's nearly Christmas, and before I head off for a bit of a holiday, here's a quick bug issue you might encounter. Despite the increasing power and sophistication of the search technologies in Sitecore, sometimes we still need to fall back to good old-fashioned Sitecore Query. A common reason for this is because the query you're writing depends on the structure of the data, not its content. Recently a colleague of mine pointed out some issues to me with the way some queries are resolved, which I thought might be of interest to others.
After last week's work on installing the Coveo search service, this week we'll move on to how that script can be extended to install the Coveo REST API and the Coveo for Sitecore package.
Getting back to the the issue of installing things for a Sitecore development environment, this week I'm going to start tackling how you can add "Coveo for Sitecore" to a machine. While Coveo have provided some documentation on how this can be achieved, (for CES and REST APIs) they make they point that they don't offer support for this approach to installation. So this may not be right for everyone. But in case it's of use to you, here's the first part of my attempt at the automation:
