Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
A while back I had the chance to look into the my initial install issue, I've spent a bit of time looking at Coveo's approach to the faceted search I'd used on some recent projects. Whilst this mostly works really easily, I've spotted a minor shortcoming in the out-of-the-box functionality which needed a quick work around for my scenario to work.
I was having a conversation with a programmer new to C# recently, who was rather confused by something similar to the following bit of code. He'd been looking at the source for a library on GitHub, and he didn't understand why this could run without errors:
To him, it seemed to be risking a
NullReferenceException, as you can't call a method on a null object.
I encountered a strange error last week, while setting up a virtual machine for some testing: Double clicking the Sitecore 7.2 installer would show the "Extracting" dialog, but after a short while it would vanish and nothing else would happen...
Later this week I've got the chance to do some training on the Coveo for Sitecore search solution. The invite to the training said that attendees need to bring a computer running an instance of the software to use during the class. So I've been spending a bit of time building up a virtual machine for this purpose, to get a handle on the install process for Coveo.
Being the enthusiastic type, I tried doing this installation on a machine running Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 – but it turns out this wasn't a great idea.
Having upgraded my computer to Windows 10, I found myself unable to install updates to VirtualBox. After downloading the 4.3.40 (build 101610) release, clicking the installer immediately gave the error:
Like many people around the internet, I've upgraded my computer to Windows 10 this weekend. So far I'm reasonably happy with the upgrade – most of my stuff has continued to work fine, and the few installation issues I hit were already well documented by the internet community. I will admit to a bit of "who moved my cheese" style frustration at some of the changes though – but I'm sure that will pass as I get used to them...
But I also came across one issue I wasn't expecting which I had a bit more trouble finding the answer to: What happens if your PC was connected to a Windows Server Essentials domain for backup and then you try to upgrade?
I came across an interesting approach for improving the performance of
automated package installs
the other day. In the space of one day of internet reading I saw the
Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext
class mentioned
in a blog post
and it came up in MVP forum discussions. In both cases, it was mentioned in the context of making item operations faster. Hence it seemed like an interesting thing to investigate, to see what sort of difference it would make to my previous work.
I came across a Sitemap generation code), the idea interested me enough to do a bit more research into the topic, and try to work out the details.
So here's some notes on the hows and whys of using code to change layout details. (I'm working on Sitecore 6.6 here, but this information is relevant to many versions of Sitecore)
Another helpful addition to the "scripted installs" functions I've been looking at for the last few weeks is the ability to trigger a full rebuild of a search index. Last week we looked at deferring the indexing of items installed by a package to try and help speed up the scripted install of packages. So it makes sense to be able to trigger a build as well...
Last week I looked at some simple PowerShell script to automate installing packages into Sitecore instances. Having spent a bit of time testing this process, I found a couple of useful tips for speeding it up:
