Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
For me at least, Symposium is going to be very interesting this year. The move to composable, the first big public event discussing the reality of XM Cloud and the new Sitecore Search product will all generate a lot of interesting content. Plus, with this being the first in-person event since the whole COVID business, I'm expecting quite a buzz this year. Since the first version of the agenda for the sessions was published last week, I've been doing a bit of thinking about what I want to watch in amongst all the great content. So here are some thoughts on the key breakout sessions I'd like to attend. Other than the one that I'm presenting, of course...
One of the challenges you often deal with using software that's under active development, is that as you take the lastest updates you can find that they subtly change (or break) the behaviour of the tool - affecting stuff that used to work for you. I had a classic example of this recently with this blog. An update to the Statiq engine fixed something in the core library code and created a subtle issue for my website. Since the docs for Statiq don't make this obvious, here's some information for anyone else finding this problem:
If you're part of the Sitecore Partner or MVP community then you probably watched some of the content from their "Global Sales Kick-off" recently. They talked about product roadmap and strategy stuff for the coming year, especially the new XM Cloud product. But something else which Dave O'Flanagan called out in his session is of interest to us in the community too: Sitecore's new internal demo portal.
The need to spin up a demo instance of Sitecore has been a common challenge for me over the time I've worked with the product. There have been various ways to do this - some very manual, and some involving a bit more automation. Different organisations and people all had their own approaches to how best to do this - but it's now being looked at centrally. I was lucky enough to get a sneak-peak of their new approach to this problem. And now it's been launched it seemed like something worth writing up, to make more Partners and MVPs aware of the tools at their disposal.
One of the recurring themes of deploying Sitecore over the last few years has been "how do I deal with Solr?". It's a question with many valid answers... I've been doing some research for a client recently, because they wanted to run their own SolrCloud instances in Kubernetes - and I came across the Apache Foundation's "Solr Operator" project. It's an interesting shortcut to efficient containerised deployments of Solr, and it might help you too...
For the moment Sitecore don't support Windows 11 for installing XM or XP - but since Microsoft have a fairly agressive policy of rolling it out to machines currently running Windows 10 and installing it by default on new hardware, there are a fair few developers out there finding themselves having to work out how to get it to work...
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...
