Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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:
One of the things I've been doing over the festive period is reinstalling some laptops. While it's usually a slightly tedious job, something Microsoft have done to the Windows Installer of late has made picking the Windows version you want harder than it should be. So I'm leaving myself a note for next time I crash into this problem...
It's been a while coming, but over the last couple of months I've finally gone throught the process of migrating my blog content off WordPress and onto a statically hosted site. A few people have asked me why I'd go to the trouble of doing this, so while I'm having a festive break from proper Sitecore stuff, I thought I should write about my reasoning:
I've had some conversations recently about odd issues with search-driven sites, whose root cause was related to disaster recovery patterns. While it's important to make sure that your business-critical website has a good backup and recovery process in place, it's also important to pay attention to how to correctly configure these scenarios...
My work on a container-based v10.0 project keeps raising interesting challenges – things that don’t work quite the same way in Docker or Kubernetes, compared to the old world of "bare metal" installs of Sitecore. Custom log files are an example here...
My QA team had a deployment issue recently, where Azure DevOps failed to successfully release to a couple of servers. The reason for the failure wasn't obvious to me immediately, so here's a quick write-up for Google, in the hope it saves some other people.
