Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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 did a little proof-of-concept hacking recently around the idea of "what's the least work required to allow your existing Sitecore website public login to move to Entra". I ended up with the bones of an interesting approach, which might be of interest to others. So read on for ideas:
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...
Having sorted out my travel plans for this October's Symposium and MVP Summit in Nashville**1 , I've been having a think about what sessions I'd like to go and see. Here's a summary of my thoughts so far...
I was having a chat recently about alternatives to
Postman
if you needed to send HTTP requests to arbitrary web endpoints. I mentioned using Visual Studio's support for
.http
files for this during that discussion, and then found myself trying it out for some work too. But it seems there's a couple of tricky little bugs hiding in here, which tripped me up when I tried to set up a call to one of Sitecore's XM Cloud GraphQL endpoints.
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...
There are some days when technology just doesn't want to play ball. And in my experience 99% of these days are when you're on a developer training course and its the exercise/labs machine that's being difficult. I had this recently on the XM Cloud developer intro course. I've no idea if anyone else would ever see this issue (or how it was caused) but it didn't return much useful info in Google, and I did find a way to fix for my problem. So it's documentation time...
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...
The other week I got the chance to do a talk for the Manchester user group in the UK about the what & why of Sitecore's Accelerate program. It seemed like a topic that was worth summarising here as well, for people who prefer to read their info rather than watch it...
