Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I'm in the middle of preparing a talk for an upcoming Sitecore user group on the subject of using PowerShell DSC for Sitecore installs. (I'll post a write up of the talk after I've given it) And one of the things I've discovered is that once you get into the guts of it, using configuration variables alongside Script Resources can be a bit confusing.
So, for the benefit of my future self (I'm bound to forget this as I am taking time off from my preparation to head over to the US for this**1 and this**2 ) I'm writing down what I've worked out...
This week I've spent a bit of time trying to knock up a quick demo of how Coveo can cope with searching in languages other than English. However, it's just my luck that the language I have to demo in is not on the list of languages supported out-of-the-box: Welsh. Hence I've been investigating how to customise the UI so that things look right for my demo. Turns out there are a few things to think about:
Previously, I've written a few posts (here, here and here) about automation approaches and PowerShell scripts I was experimenting with for installing developer instances of Sitecore 6. It seems about time that I checked out how that scripting work copes with newer versions of Sitecore...
As I slowly get to move from v6.6 era versions of Sitecore onto the more modern releases, one of the topics I've been re-visiting is install automation. In the past I'd looked at PowerShell scripts for installing Sitecore itself, and configuring development sites, but one of the new things to deal with once you move past v7.5 is the need for MongoDB. Turns out, that's pretty easy to automate if you need to:
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?
