Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I've spent a bit of time looking at how Regular expressions are changing in the upcoming .Net 7 release. While they do have a bit of a reputation for making people's lives worse (so much there's a well known programmer joke about it) they do have a place in your developer toolbox. So what caught my eye in the new features, and how does code get better with this new version?
I updated the build project for this blog recently, as the engine used to generate it was updated. But doing that caused an issue which I think others might bump into. So here's an explanation of what I saw and how to fix it:
I hit a rather confusing issue with a release a while back, which initially appeared to be a Unicorn problem. But after investigating the details, I think this was actually an infrastructure problem causing some odd behaviour. I doubt this is a common problem, but still worth writing down in case it's a challenge for anyone else...
Recently I needed to do an odd bit of printing. I needed to generate an A3 PDF for printing which had crop marks around it. That means it needs to be printed to "a bit larger than A3" size. In the past I'd used Foxit's PDF printer for this (where it just worked), but that no longer seems to be free. Turns out the default Windows PDF printer needs a bit of hackery to enable using odd-sized paper. I'm sure I'll find myself needing to do this again in the future, so this is a reminder for my future self.
I wasn't at SUGCON this year, but I was watching the Twitter reactions, and I've chatted to a few community people about what was said at the event. And in amongst all the exiting technical stuff about XM Cloud, I think there's one slide which really stands out to me...
I've started looking at the details of the Headless Services GraphQL endpoints in Sitecore recently. And as part of this research, I got a bit confused trying to test queries in the Sitecore UI. I've worked out what was up, but maybe others will find themselves in a similar situation, so:
I came across an interesting issue generating a Sitecore Package recently. Googling the issue didn't give me the whole answer, so it's time to enhance the internet again with a explanation of what I saw and why I think it happened...
I realised recently that I've become quite used to way many web forms let you paste image data straight into a text field. The behaviour of "upload the image data, and insert the correct mark-up for the image" is a really helpful shortcut when you're editing DevOps tickets, or Stack Overflow answers. So I started wondering how easy it would be to add that to the text editing tool I use for writing these blog posts. Turns out, not too hard, because WPF has some helpful extension patterns...
If you're reading this soon after I post it then it's very nearly the end of the "grace period" where anyone can run Docker Desktop. As of 1st February if your business meets certain requirements you have to pay for each user. So what can us Sitecore devs do if we aren't in a position to pay that fee? Well the good news is you can run Docker without the Desktop bit, and it's not too tricky once you wrap your head around a few things...
I spent some time working with a colleague who couldn't get his docker instance to start up happily this week. And it's reminded me that for all its positives, there are still some challenges with understanding the underlying issues when a developer container instance breaks. I realised I need a "go read this" post for the start of future discussions like this, so here are some problems you might see, and some diagnostic suggestions I wanted a convenient way to share:
