Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
One of the interesting announcements from last year's Symposium was Sitecore's approach to how we might join up our composable applications. They announced that they were working on "Sitecore Connect" at this event, but didn't really get into detail of what it would be outside of "we're re-badging Workato". So what is that, and what does it suggest we might get out of Connect in the future? Read on, for an attempt at working that out...
I've been migrating a big chunk of .Net 4 code to .Net 7 recently. One of the few large changes I had to make was to replace some boilerplate generation that used T4 Templates with a Source Generator. (As T4 isn't entirely supported in latest .Net) But these work very differently, so that change involved a good chunk of work. But I messed this up in a way that caused a subtle bug. And while I may well get to writing about Source Generators later, that silly bug is also worth writing up. Even if it's just to remind me not to make the same mistake in the future...
A requirement which comes up every so often is that external systems need to know about changes to content that lives in Sitecore. As with most technical problems, there are a variety of ways that you can solve a problem like this, and they all have different pros and cons. One of my colleagues has been working on a project like this recently, and the approach required there meant we bumped up against an interesting configuration challenge. If you're writing code that monitors content changes you might need to think about this:
Computers. Very useful when they work, but wildly frustrating when they don't. Recently I had one of those moments of frustration (well, two days actually) with Azure Devops and its YAML-based build pipelines. The root cause here seems like one of those things that could well bite others, so here's what happened to me...
Most of the time when I want to explore the filesystem of a Sitecore container, it's pretty easy. I can use Visual Studio's container browser. But that only works when a container is running - and if it's based on a job image this may be a very brief window - too brief to find and explore the file in question. So what can I do?
A while back I wrote a post about how you could extract the raw Solr query from Sitecore's ContentSearch APIs. Usually the queries hid behind LINQ operations, but there are times where having the raw text can be helpful - sometimes Sitecore's API doesn't support the operations you need. That work was done under Sitecore v10.0, but having tried to repeat it under v10.2, I discover it no longer works. There have been some changes under the surface of ContentSearch which require a different approach. So if you need to do this under v10.2, here's how:
The other day my copy of Docker Desktop on two different work laptops prompted me to update. And neither would work properly after the update completed. In case this issue is affecting others, here's the saga of what I saw and two ways it can be fixed:
After a bit more of a pause than most attendees of Symposium this year were expecting, Sitecore 10.3 is finally out in the wild now. And (to me at least) one of the most interesting changes is that the server-side event model for the CMS has been extended with Webhooks. What does that mean, and how can you make use of them? Well since I was lucky enough to get my hands on the "MVP Preview" of this release a couple of weeks back, I've had a chance to do some digging. Read on to find out...
There's been a lot going on with language development in C# over the last couple of years. But despite all the current change for things like record types and generic maths, there are some changes from older versions that I somehow missed. This week social media put me on to the concept of contextual filters for exception handling. What's that? Read on...
I had a moment of confusion with broken Insert Options recently, which made me wonder whether I ever knew the answer behind the issue or whether I'd just forgotten it over the many years I've been working with this CMS. Either way, this needs writing down to help me remember it in the future...
