Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
My moment of confusion from a while back came in the middle of a big chunk of client development work. The solution already used the generator-helix package, but the work needed to make use of TDS, rather than Unicorn. Since I was going to be involved in creating a set of new features, and potentially a load of TDS projects, I wondered what it would take to make the generator-helix package support TDS...
Symposium 2019 seems a loooong time ago now – but it was only last November. Back then, I did a session on understanding the basics of Solr and SolrCloud to help Sitecore developers with their production deployments.
I presented a session at the London and Manchester user groups recently, where I talked about what I needed to do in order to get started developing Sitecore code under Docker.
One of the minor annoyances of some XM releases of Sitecore is that rather than just disabling analytics and not running xConnect, they do not include the DLLs necessary for personalisation at all. That can be a bit of a pain sometimes – as I discovered recently when I tried to deploy some client code into an XM docker container. The site broke because the client code included references to a personalisation DLL – which made me realise I actually wanted an "XP in XM mode" container so I didn't need to bother with the memory and CPU for xConnect. So here's how I hacked one up...
Because of the old maxim "anything you do more than once should be automated", we all find ourselves working with tools to auto-generate projects and solutions for Helix architecture these days. Mostly these tools work fine – but every so often you can bump your head against unexpected behaviour – as I did recently:
Having started down the Docker road, I hit an interesting issue the other day. How do you get Sitecore to generate absolute links correctly when your site runs inside a container?
There's been a lot of movement towards "Docker for Sitecore" over the last year – to the extent that even I have finally jumped onto the bandwagon. And with any new tech, there are some rough edges to contend with. Right now (for me at least) one of those is being able to get the right Docker images built for the bit of work you need to do. In the future (crosses fingers) we'll see Sitecore offering a repo for these images – but for now it's up to us to build our own. So if you need something that's not v9.3, here's what I did to get there:
I am no DBA. In fact I'm happy to admit that I know just enough SQL to be dangerous. So when database problems come up, they can be tricky. I recently helped a client work through an issue with analytics databases, which wasn't easy to google – so it's time to help future developers find it...
With the big news from Symposium being the start of Sitecore's move towards the SaaS market, it's interesting to have a think about what that means for us developers and architects in the medium to long term. Because it seems likely there's going to be quite a bit of change for us...
This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.
If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!
