Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
There's been a bit of a theme in my recent posts about scripting stuff, and that continues this week. I've been looking at some ideas for automating tasks for developers recently, and one of the things I was interested in was being able to get stuff downloaded from dev.sitecore.net without having to do it manually. So, here's some PowerShell that can help you with that...
I've spent the last week or so working on the config changes necessary to migrate a client site running Sitecore v8.1 from using Lucene to Solr for its search infrastructure. I've not worked much with Solr before, so this has been a good opportunity for me to learn about how it works and how it gets configured. But when I deployed my changes from my local development environment to a central testing server I discovered some odd behavior which Google didn't help with. So, for the good of search indexes everywhere, here's what happened...
I got the chance to speak at the Manchester Sitecore user group recently, introducing some tools and tricks that can be used to measure site performance while you're developing your Sitecore code. For anyone who wasn't there (and those who were but, want to refer back to what I said) here's a summary of the important bits of content from that talk...
Recently I've spent some time debugging some issues with a client site. One problem that came up during this work (which, sadly wasn't actually the problem I was looking for) was a set of errors from SQL Replication appearing in the Sitecore logs. In keeping with my previous ranting about keeping your Sitecore logs as error free as possible I spent some time working out how to solve this.
Since I'd not looked at databases at this sort of level for some considerable time, I'm writing down some notes for my future self, next time I have to worry about this sort of thing...
Following on from my previous post about things to think about if you're new to upgrading a Sitecore project in your development environment, there was another side of the issue of upgrading I wanted to point out – some of your deployment choices...
Every so often I get asked to look at existing Sitecore installs and write up reports on what's good and what's not so good about them. I spend time looking at lots of stuff, like the infrastructure, the databases, the code and security. But time after time I find myself writing up a similar issue...
I've been involved in a few discussions about the scope of projects to upgrade existing Sitecore instances in the last few weeks, and quite a lot of that discussion has focused around the "development environment" aspects of the upgrade work. So I thought I would write down some of the things that have come up in my conversations.
Something I've learned over the course of many years working in IT is that when you hit a difficult to explain problem it's very easy to say "it's the runtime's fault!" or "that's a compiler bug" to cover for the lack of explanation for your problem. The vast majority of the time, it's not true though. It's just a subtler bug in your own work that you can't see yet.
Every so often, however, it is true. And it turns out the issue I discussed the other week about Sitecore rendering a Razor error when you asked for a media item may well be an example of this.
I wasn't at SUGCON**1 this year, but I followed the event on Twitter and have read a few of the write-ups that have been posted since the event. A popular topic this year has been applying machine learning to Sitecore in the quest for ever cleverer personalised experiences. It's fascinating stuff to read about, and I'm sure it has great potential for the future, but what I didn't see much discussion of was the possible down-sides of using "AI" for these tasks rather than people making choices. So allow me to put on some comedy horns and play devil's advocate for a bit...
If you spend your life working with software, you can't help but collect a few stories of issues that defied your understanding – and I came across a great example with Sitecore recently. I haven't managed to decide if this is an issue that can happen to others, or whether it was completely specific to the setup of this particular site. But since I got few useful results from Google when I was trying to solve this, I figure it's worth writing about it just in case someone else sees a similar problem in the future...
