Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Sitecore config patches are great, right? We (should) all be using them to ensure that our changes in configuration don't get stomped on when we upgrade, or install new modules. But like any bit of technology, they can sometimes cause problems. Here's an example of one I saw recently, in the hope it can save others from similar issues:
Every so often, every developer finds themselves having to parse data out of text. There are loads of ways of approaching this task, but a lot of pretty unsatisfactory solutions start from "I'll just split up the text by whitespace" or "Hey, let's use regular expressions!". You all remember what regular expressions lead to, right?
As someone who's always on the lookout for something interesting and new to experiment with, I came across an alternative approach to parsing text recently. A blog post I read (I forget what it was, or I'd give credit) linked to the Sprache project on GitHub. This is a text parsing library which lets you construct the descriptions of the text to parse using Linq-style expressions.
So I thought I'd invent an idea for an experimental project to test this out...
Recently I was looking into how custom caching might improve the performance of Layouts in Sitecore. But one important aspect of the concept of improving performance with tricks like that which I didn't discuss was how you can work out places where caching will give you benefits...
Most of the time when you need to cache things in Sitecore, it's handled for you with the built in frameworks for data and UI layer caches. Usually your problems are solved by tuning the sizes of the caches and configuring the right caching settings on your UI components. But what happens when you've got bits of data which you want to cache that are neither components or items?
The other week I was commenting on shooting myself in the foot with the configuration of Coveo's UI for Sitecore. Another issue that came up during that bit of project work was that in their default state, the facet components didn't respond to data in the URL. Having done a bit of digging, however, one of my colleagues found an answer to this, which I figured I should write down in case anyone else is stuck on the same challenge...
There are lots of scenarios where sorting the results of Sitecore API or search queries is easy. But there's one scenario that I've come across a couple of times can be a bit trickier than the usual "sort by date" scenario.
Every so often, the move from WebForms style projects to MVC ones throws up a challenging question. An issue which I came across recently, is how do you cope with a situation where two independent components on a page need to exchange data? In WebForms projects there we could connect them together via the Layout's Code Behind, and in front-end situations JavaScript can do a similar job for us. But the situation requires back-end code and we're using MVC it's a bit more of a challenge...
I've had a Raspberry Pi sitting under my desk for some time now, but things keep getting in the way of me doing much with it. But in honour of the whole "March is for Makers" thing, I decided I needed to finally do something more than boot it up and let my son tinker with Scratch on it. I'd also acquired a "Sense Hat" add-on recently, and something about the matrix display on that made me think of animated graphs. Now that the Windows 10 IoT build is gaining features, I thought I'd try installing that and building something that would let me graph website activity – with a view to how it might get connected to Sitecore...
Sometimes you find yourself investigating errors which are made more difficult to solve by the sheer weight of hits for a term out on the internet. Top of my list of things that are a pain to Google, is any sort of Stack Overflow exception. You can guess why, right? 😉 Having gone throught that pain recently, here's some notes on an issue I helped my colleagues diagnose recently which fell straight into that trap...
Having spent a bit of time recently looking at some of the new stuff included in the tools and frameworks for ASP.Net Core 1.0 and Sitecore's Habitat solution, one of the things that caught my eye is the Gulp task runner. So after a few days of poking around, here's a basic introduction for anyone else considering it for their Sitecore work.
