Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
There was a lot of interesting information releases during Sitecore Symposium**1 last week. Since I had to summarise this for a work event, I figured I should reuse those thoughts, and write up a brief summary of some of the announcements that caught my attention, and (importantly) Sitecore's vision their future SaaS product:
Sometimes you have a problem that you should absolutely have seen coming. The annual "the company's Sitecore license has expired" fun is very much one of those things. But I'd not thought about this in advance, and the license expired while I was on holiday this year. It caused my team a load of hassle... But I have a plan to avoid this pain in the future:
I was asked to enable Sitecore's ItemService endpoints on a containerised instance of Sitecore recently, and my first pass through this didn't work. Turns out there's a key bit of documentation that seems to be missing for this scenario. Hence a quick post to help get info into Google. So if you need to do this, read on:
A while back I got a support issue where a client's Content Editor was suddenly very broken. No UI – just a giant YSOD. It's turned out to be the sort of mistake which I could see happening to others, so here's some info on what happened and ways the problem can be resolved.
There are bits of the C# language that we don't think about too much when writing websites – and implicit conversions are one of those things. But while I've been messing about with some ray-tracing code in evenings recently, I found a couple of examples they patterns they can be a help with...
I had an interesting discussion recently, about how some code could calculate a "random" but deterministic numeric value based on some data. This made me think of the classic old concept of "checksums" as a possible solution. Here's what I was thinking about:
Some time back, when I was looking at how to release containerised Sitecore into Azure Kubernetes Clusters, I worked through the question of "how do I make DevOps wait for the new images to be deployed", because you might want to run further work after the new containers are spun up. While what I tried back then was mostly working, I've found some reasons to try a different tack since then.
It seems everyone is suddenly an expert in this exciting new tech. And if you weren't paying attention, you may have missed the joke behind all of this – that it's an entirely made-up technology. Funny as the twitter shenangans were, I think there's a point hiding here for us as developers. What is it? Well...
Last time out I was looking at applying async/await patterns to some pipeline patterns for C#. After I came up with the initial solution I outlined in that post, there was some more back-and-forth in the discussion thread that prompted all this. And that discussion made me realise there was an interesting side effect of the code I wrote, which might lead to some confusing bugs. So back to the drawing board...
Ages ago I wrote some posts about an approach to pipeline-style code patterns for C# code. Recently I got a question on a gist I'd written to go with that article, because someone was having issues adding async code into pipeline components. Async patterns are much more common now, but this wasn't something I'd actually tried. Cue some interesting experiments...
