Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I noticed the other week that the sitemap file my blog was generating included the urls, but none of the other metadata that they can report. To be honest, I'm not sure if search engines pay much attention to this these days, but since the schema for the files includes other options I decided to see if I could add them.
I was looking at writing a tool in .Net 7 the other day which would benefit from having an option to load and unload plugin extensions. Reloadable plugins could be a bit tricky in .Net 4, but doable. But that's changed dramatically in more recent framework versions, in some ways that are better and interesting.
My recent post about messing up with inheritance came out of some work to migrate some (fairly old) T4 Template code generation to .Net's newer Source Generators feature. Excluding my own mistakes, this process wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. So it seemed like a good topic to jot some notes down about, in case others are facing similar challenges...
The other day I had a scenario where I wanted to be able to display the date an app was built in its UI. While you can always fall back to a "just make that a string in your code" approach, after a bit of digging I discovered a better way. It turns out recent .Net code has some clever patterns to help with this...
Since the whole "Twitter's in something of a downward spiral" thing kicked off, I'd been musing over the idea that having embedded tweets in my blog might not be such a good thing long term. What happens if the mad billionaire at the helm suddenly decides that embedding tweets should be a paid feature, or the site has a long outage? The best alternative I had was to turn the tweets into images - so obviously I investigated how I could automate this. Turns out it was a fun feature to add to my blog editor...
I've been migrating a big chunk of .Net 4 code to .Net 7 recently. One of the few large changes I had to make was to replace some boilerplate generation that used T4 Templates with a Source Generator. (As T4 isn't entirely supported in latest .Net) But these work very differently, so that change involved a good chunk of work. But I messed this up in a way that caused a subtle bug. And while I may well get to writing about Source Generators later, that silly bug is also worth writing up. Even if it's just to remind me not to make the same mistake in the future...
There's been a lot going on with language development in C# over the last couple of years. But despite all the current change for things like record types and generic maths, there are some changes from older versions that I somehow missed. This week social media put me on to the concept of contextual filters for exception handling. What's that? Read on...
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 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...
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...
