I encountered a strange error last week, while setting up a virtual machine for some testing: Double clicking the Sitecore 7.2 installer would show the "Extracting" dialog, but after a short while it would vanish and nothing else would happen...
Later this week I've got the chance to do some training on the Coveo for Sitecore search solution. The invite to the training said that attendees need to bring a computer running an instance of the software to use during the class. So I've been spending a bit of time building up a virtual machine for this purpose, to get a handle on the install process for Coveo.
Being the enthusiastic type, I tried doing this installation on a machine running Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 – but it turns out this wasn't a great idea.
I came across an interesting approach for improving the performance of
automated package installs
the other day. In the space of one day of internet reading I saw the
Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext
class mentioned
in a blog post
and it came up in MVP forum discussions. In both cases, it was mentioned in the context of making item operations faster. Hence it seemed like an interesting thing to investigate, to see what sort of difference it would make to my previous work.
I came across a Sitemap generation code), the idea interested me enough to do a bit more research into the topic, and try to work out the details.
So here's some notes on the hows and whys of using code to change layout details. (I'm working on Sitecore 6.6 here, but this information is relevant to many versions of Sitecore)
Another helpful addition to the "scripted installs" functions I've been looking at for the last few weeks is the ability to trigger a full rebuild of a search index. Last week we looked at deferring the indexing of items installed by a package to try and help speed up the scripted install of packages. So it makes sense to be able to trigger a build as well...
Last week I looked at some simple PowerShell script to automate installing packages into Sitecore instances. Having spent a bit of time testing this process, I found a couple of useful tips for speeding it up:
After you've finished installing an instance of Sitecore for development or test (as I've been discussing in my previous few posts – Installing, Adding DMS, Hosts & SSL), chances are you'll need to deploy some modules or packages onto it. Things like Web Forms for Marketers are regularly needed as a basis for development work. So what can you do if you'd like to automate this with PowerShell as well?
Continuing my current theme of installation automation via PowerShell, the next task I found myself looking at was how to enable Sitecore's analytics for a newly installed Sitecore instance. This is a task that the standard .exe installer doesn't do for the v6.6 sites I'm working with, but is relatively simple to automate.
Ages back I wrote up some
work on automating the Sitecore installer. I noted back then that I wasn't sure what the purpose of the
SC_IISSITE_ID
parameter to the MSI was. Having done some more work on the topic of install automation recently, I've got some more detail on what it's for now, as well as another parameter that's more important than I had realised...
When you install an instance of Sitecore via the .exe installer you get a single host name added to your machine, which matches the instance name you chose. But for real world projects this is rarely enough. Most websites need to respond to other host names, and they often also need SSL certificates installed so that these hosts can be accessed via HTTPS. Developers need these features set up so that they can code and test with them.
Recently I've been looking at automating more installation tasks via PowerShell, in order to try and standardise the processes developers use when setting up new instances for work. I've been digging out helpful bits of script from across the internet, and I plan to write a few posts to document some of the approaches I've been experimenting with. The first of these posts covers info on automating host names and their bindings: