Every so often pretty much every developer ends up in a situation where they're looking at a bug that manifests on one platform, but not on another. The sort of bug where you end up spending hours looking through log and config files for a subtle difference. I found myself looking into just this sort of bug recently, but on a site where (to my frustration) the config files were full of comments and whitespace differences across platforms that made diffing really hard ** . Spotting that subtle bug-causing difference is pretty much impossible when your diff is full of noise... So how can we fix that?
In theory, the magic of Dynamic Placeholders lets us have a container component placed onto your page more than once. That didn't work in the old world of "static" placeholders, because the rendering engine didn't like two placeholders with the same name. But despite it's benefits, the dynamic implementation has an annoying edge case – you may not be able to enable caching for your container component. I had a client bump into this issue recently, so I spent some time considering approaches that might help them address this issue.
I've been working on an international deployment of Sitecore recently, and resolving some problems around how publishing raises remote events has demonstrated that there are some things about the publishing process that I didn't entirely understand... I doubt this is a common scenario, but it still seems worth writing down what I've learned – So here's another crib sheet for my future self: