Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I hit an interesting issue recently: Some code that worked fine on a QA instance of Sitecore had been deployed for UAT and was now failing with an odd error message. Whilst this issue was entirely our fault, there wasn't much in Google about the error messages I was seeing, so I'm trying to correct that problem today...
I've been looking at adjusting SIF scripts for a production deployment recently, and realised that sometimes you'd like SIF to generate random passwords for you, but you need them logged so you can reuse them in scripts you're crafting for other roles. It doesn't do that out of the box, but it turns out it's actually quite simple:
One of the projects I'm working on at the moment came with a requirement to change Sitecore v9.1 from running with the default SQL Security accounts to trusted connections using specific Active Directory accounts that the client provided. While there's a bit of work to do to enable this, it shouldn't be too tough. But trying to be a bit clever, I hit upon an issue which seemed worth documenting...
I've been using VS2019 for all my personal development work pretty much since the first preview came out. For general coding and debugging it's been good so far – stable, and effective. And little things like git stash control from the UI make me happy... It got its full release recently, just before I spoke at SUGCON 2019 – where I said I'd blog something about how 2019 changed the performance measurement stuff that I was presenting. Having done some tests in the last few days, it's not looking so shiny any more...
If you missed my session at SUGCON this year, or if you were there but want to go back over something I said, don't worry: The slides and a transcript of what I was saying are available here...
Recently I got the opportunity to do Sitecore's "Implementing Experience Commerce" training course, and get certified in the details of how Commerce works these days. While I was doing the lab exercises for the course I hit an interesting bug, which seemed like just the sort of thing that others might encounter.
So if you're extending the Commerce OData APIs, watch out:
I got a fun support ticket recently, for a client on Sitecore v8.1 whose analytics processing had stopped working. Their outstanding queue of raw analytics data that needed to be aggregated was slowly growing, and some functionality which relied on the existence of recent analyics data had stopped working. Trying to fix this caused me to look at two issues which are related to how Web Forms for Marketers data is processed in analytics – and these seemed like issues that other people who do support work might need info on...
Recently Steve McGill asked me if I'd tried using SIF's certificate creation when automating Solr setup for Sitecore. I realised I'd not put any effort into how this might work – and that seemed like an excellent excuse for some research...
Ever been asked to set up a Reverse Proxy to allow a particular URL on your website to fetch its content from a site somewhere else? It's not an uncommon requirement, but it seems to cause some configuration challenges too. Having been drafted in to solve some issues with just such a setup recently, here's a quick description of the stuff I need to remember next time I get this job:
Recently I was writing about the changes to Java licensing that Oracle are enforcing in 2019. It's not an uncommon reaction to the challenges that the new license introduces to start thinking about alternatives to how you might manage search for your Sitecore deployments. So what can you do?
