Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
After my recent delve into memory optimisation for non-work code, I spent some time recently investigating a memory issue in a production Sitecore site. The outcome of that was an issue which can be a common problem for .Net code. So in the hope of seeing it less in the future, here are some notes on what I saw and how you can avoid the same trap...
Symposium is over for another year. I have mostly recovered from the jet-lag now and I've wrestled my inbox into submission at work. So it's time to write up my thoughts on the conference. I took about 35 pages of notes over the course of the week, plus countless photos of slides. So from all that what stuck out as interesting to me?
I quite often clone Sitecore's Docker Examples repo and spin up a Sitecore instance to experiment with. It's a quick way to create a disposable site which I can easily configure and deploy little bits of test code to. But recently I did this and noticed some odd warnings. So here's what happened and why, to help you avoid the same issue...
Data Template inheritance. Most of the time it's great and a powerful tool to help you define your content schema effectively. But there are a few places where it can trip you up - and one of the interesting ones is duplicated field names. I found myself chatting about what actually happens and how this might affect PowerShell scripts and headless code recently, and it seemed worth writing down...
I had a moment of frustration recently, when I spent a while looking for a Data Template in a particular Sitecore site and couldn't find it because a previous developer had set a Display Name. As a result of moaning about this Corey Smith reminded me of a way I could have helped myself here, and it seemed like something to share...
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...
Sometimes things you think you know turn out not to be right. I got bitten by this issue recently, and it seemed like something to write down. Because being wrong is fine, as long as you learn something...
I bumped into an interesting redirect-loop issue with a Sitecore instance sitting behind Azure Front Door recently. It's not a product I know a great deal about, so this seemed worth writing down in case I come across it again, or others bump into the same challenge. Turns out it wasn't a Sitecore-specific issue, but its definitely something which could affect other Sitecore sites...
I wasted a few hours recently when I did something which seemed entirely reasonable with Rule-Based Config in Sitecore and it did not work the way I thought it would. Here's an explanation of what I did and what happened as a result, so you can avoid making the same mistake as me...
There aren't that many places where RSS gets used these days (Shame! It's still good!), but that doesn't stop the occasional requirement for it coming up in projects. Recently I was having some discussions about how a client's site could offer RSS for their content which included custom UTM codes in the feed links. That's not too tricky to achieve with Sitecore, so here's an example of what you might do.
