Just because stuff is "old" doesn't mean it's not interesting... I found myself having a discussion with a colleague recently about the state management patterns that Sitecore uses for things like
SecurityDisabler
and how they work in the ASP.Net pipeline. It's not new tech, but it is an interesting pattern which you might find uses for outside your XP implementations...
Time for the final part of my series on controlling a web browser. With code to load a browser, and the overarching State Machine to control it, this part finishes off with the code for some states to load a page and extract its markup. Plus a few conclusions...
Continuing from my previous post about firing up a browser in order to automate it, this post moves on to the overall pattern for how the browser can be controlled.
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...
A while back I wrote a couple of posts on the subject of how code pipelines can work in a more functional .Net world. I've made use of those patterns in some code of my own, and I've found these posts have generated quite a lot of questions from readers here and followers on twitter. But I've never been quite happy with the implementation in my own code...
In my last post I was thinking about a more functional approach to defining pipelines, after having heard about some interesting new code that Sitecore had been working on. Since writing that I've had a few conversations where the topic "but what about if I want a pipeline to come from configuration?" has come up. I've been away from work for the last week doing my civic duty on Jury Service, but I've had some time in between court sessions that I've spent thinking about how last weeks ideas and configuration files might be combined.
So here's one way it could work:
There was a lot of exciting new stuff on show at the Sitecore's recent MVP Summit and Symposium the other week. Plenty of others have written up the general goings on at those events (have a google – there's lots to read), so I thought I'd focus on something more specific that piqued my interest: the novel approach that's being taken to pipelines in some of the new code Sitecore are producing.