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...
Earlier this week, I got my first chance to take a look at the agenda for this year's SUGCON EU**1 (in Dublin next month), and a few things jumped out for me as things I probably want to watch at the event. Maybe they'd be of interest to you too?
Sometimes things you think you know turn out not to be right. I got bitten by this issue recently, and it seemed like something to write down. Because being wrong is fine, as long as you learn something...
I bumped into an interesting redirect-loop issue with a Sitecore instance sitting behind Azure Front Door recently. It's not a product I know a great deal about, so this seemed worth writing down in case I come across it again, or others bump into the same challenge. Turns out it wasn't a Sitecore-specific issue, but its definitely something which could affect other Sitecore sites...
There was a lot of interesting discussion at SUGCON NA and the MVP Summit towards the back-end of last year. I've got piles of notes I took about stuff that caught my attention over the course of those events. But out of all the sessions, one specific thing stuck out to me as a vision of our future as Sitecore developers. And it's a topic that's come up a few times in my conversations with people at work and in the general community. So it seemed like it was worth writing about...