Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Some of the most frustrating issues in IT happen when a thing which was working fine stops, and you're sure you didn't change anything. Now that very few people host their own infrastructure, these issues can be compounded because change or problems might happen in the internals of a complex infrastructure system you have no control over. I got bitten by this recently, and while I have no answers I suspect this is worth writing up just because it may help other people to realise the problem you have is not always your fault...
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.
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...
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.
I was creating a quick package to transfer some content between Sitecore instances the other day, and happened to scroll down to the bottom of the Metadata page in Package Designer. Not for any real reason – just some over-enthusiastic scroll-wheel action. But when I looked at the dialog, it struck me that there were two fields here I'd never paid any attention to before:
