Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
While I've read plenty of articles in the past about configuring build servers for Sitecore projects, I've not seen much written about using Visual Studio Online. (Or "Team Foundation Services", or whatever it's called this week) Since the company I work for are in the process of transitioning all their development infrastructure to Azure, trying to get hosted builds working in VSO seemed like a userful area of research for me. This is the first part of what will probably turn into a few posts on the topic of how I got to the point of being able to run a hosted build for a Sitecore / TDS / FakeDB solution...
A colleague of mine has been looking at some custom page events and reporting in Sitecore 8.1 recently. One thing which came to light during this work is that some of the personalisation rule code in the product didn't appear to work as expected. In case anyone else is looking at this aspect of the software, he's a summary of the issue we were seeing, in the hope that it can help you avoid the time we spent looking into this:
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.
Quick one this week. Mostly to try and save my own blushes, because the issue here was completely my fault. For the first time on a particular project I was trying to do some Coveo development work. I had created a page based on the default MVC templates they provide for search, but when I tried to add a Facet in Content Editor, I found myself staring at this:
No picker for the field to facet on – so no way to make the Facet component work...
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...
