Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
A very long time ago I managed a server with some websites on it. So long ago, in fact, that this "cutting edge" deployment was on Windows 2000 Server. I made a virtual machine backup of this server at the time, burned the files onto a DVD and filed this away in case I ever needed it. And recently I had reason to want some data off this ancient machine. I was able to get it fired up, but it took a little effort to get there. It feels like a minor miracle that I was able to make this run, so I wanted to write down some of the things I messed about with - partly so I'll remember if I ever have to do something similar again, and partly because this might be of interest to (a small number of) others too...
There are some days when technology just doesn't want to play ball. And in my experience 99% of these days are when you're on a developer training course and its the exercise/labs machine that's being difficult. I had this recently on the XM Cloud developer intro course. I've no idea if anyone else would ever see this issue (or how it was caused) but it didn't return much useful info in Google, and I did find a way to fix for my problem. So it's documentation time...
It struck me recently that there are a few places in this blog where I linked to pages I know will disappear over time. The examples that started me thinking about this were the Symposium and SUGCON websites that get published each year. They tend to reuse the same domain names from year to year without archiving the old content. So those links go stale fairly quickly, and posts from years back now point to this year's events by default. So I started wondering if I could fix this issue automatically...
Just because stuff is "old" doesn't mean it's not interesting... I found myself having a discussion with a colleague recently about the state management patterns that Sitecore uses for things like
SecurityDisabler
and how they work in the ASP.Net pipeline. It's not new tech, but it is an interesting pattern which you might find uses for outside your XP implementations...
The other week I got the chance to do a talk for the Manchester user group in the UK about the what & why of Sitecore's Accelerate program. It seemed like a topic that was worth summarising here as well, for people who prefer to read their info rather than watch it...
Earlier this week, I got my first chance to take a look at the agenda for this year's SUGCON EU**1 (in Dublin next month), and a few things jumped out for me as things I probably want to watch at the event. Maybe they'd be of interest to you too?
Sometimes things you think you know turn out not to be right. I got bitten by this issue recently, and it seemed like something to write down. Because being wrong is fine, as long as you learn something...
There are certain "rules of programming" that I keep hearing about in my career. One that came up in an interesting work debate recently was "you should never use regular expressions to parse HTML". Don't get me wrong - there can be a lot of useful knowledge wrapped up in these rules, but should we always follow them to the letter? I think it's an interesting question...
I bumped into an interesting redirect-loop issue with a Sitecore instance sitting behind Azure Front Door recently. It's not a product I know a great deal about, so this seemed worth writing down in case I come across it again, or others bump into the same challenge. Turns out it wasn't a Sitecore-specific issue, but its definitely something which could affect other Sitecore sites...
There was a lot of interesting discussion at SUGCON NA and the MVP Summit towards the back-end of last year. I've got piles of notes I took about stuff that caught my attention over the course of those events. But out of all the sessions, one specific thing stuck out to me as a vision of our future as Sitecore developers. And it's a topic that's come up a few times in my conversations with people at work and in the general community. So it seemed like it was worth writing about...
