Software Craftsmanship Plugins, why should I care? In my last post, Watch your Composition Root, while exploring how I keep my bootstrapping code nice and tidy, I point out that the approach workes very well when implementing the plugin pattern.
Dependency Injection Watch your Composition Root IoC is a great pattern that can help make business logic easier to maintain and independently test, all while decreasing complexity. However, in large applications object dependency graphs can become quite complicated making
Unit Testing Test First Drop Bear I love TDD, but there could be a Drop Bare[1] waiting for you. The whole Red Green Refactor cycle is great but, can it be taken too far? When I started coding
Express yourself Express yourself - Constants This is the second instalment in this series exploring the building blocks of computer programming from a C# point of view. For the first instalment, please read Variables and Values Constant A simplistic
Software Craftsmanship One, One Responsibility HA HA HA HA! Over the past five weeks, I have been sharing my understanding of the SOLID principles with my team. Now being at the end of week five I wanted to share this understanding with
Sitecore Commerce Sellable Item why are you so null? I recently followed the steps set out in the Sitecore Commerce Developer's Guide to add additional properties to the sellable item, this was achieved by adding another property to the products in commerce
Sitecore Commerce Re-bootstrap & initialise The first thing we need to do is to clear out the Commerce Engine databases. USE XXXX_Global; TRUNCATE TABLE CommerceEntities; TRUNCATE TABLE CommerceLists; TRUNCATE TABLE Versions; USE XXXX_SharedEnvironments; TRUNCATE TABLE CommerceEntities;
Sitecore Commerce Add a variant to the cart, not the product itself. When trying to add an item to the cart I was getting the following error 41 10:23:28 ERROR CtxMsg.Error.EntityNotFound: Text=Entity 'Catalog|Modem|' was not found. 41 10:
Sitecore Commerce Aaron asks Rob Sitecore Commerce questions How do I clear out the Commerce Engine database? Truncate all of the tables in XXX_Global & XXX_SharedEnvironments DB's, then recycle IIS and reboostrap & initialize. Why can't I add a
Express yourself Express yourself - Variables and values Variables and values are intimately intertwined. In mathematics, a variable describes an alphabetic character used to represent a number, whereas the value is that number. In programming, the meaning is very similar, a
Express yourself Express yourself - Init Values, constants, variables, operators, objects and functions are, in my mind the most basic building blocks of a modern computer program, and like many other terms in computing, they are borrowed from mathematics.
Learn C# The newbie Hello All, I would like to thank Aaron for bringing myself on board. Being able to offer you years of experience like Aaron I cannot. While this June I will have been working
What When How Computers. You are the Computer Once upon a time, the noun Computer did not refer to the magical machine sitting on my desk, in fact, I would have been the Computer. In early 1600, the word computer first
Learn C# Gravypower Rebooted The last post made on this blog was back in 2015 when I was still living in Belfast since then a lot has changed. My partner and I moved back to Australia, we
Dependencies To check in dependencies or not to check in dependencies I have been playing around in the world of Drupal and Front End development for a while now and have come across a topic of discussion that I thought I had heard the
Sitecore Unit Tetsing and Sitecore I am a big advocate of TDD and would love to see interfaces on all of the Sitecore types, this is a big ask to put to the product team as they have
Heartbleed and Password Safes After reading about the Heartbleed bug last Monday I felt it was time to stop putting off swapping to a password safe. A password safe is a database that generates and stores passwords,
Ncrunch, SharePoint and Microsoft Fakes For the past month I have been working with SharePoint and also neglecting to blog. Today I stop that neglect to share something about TDD and SharePoint. I use a product call NCrunch,
Design Patterns Abstract Factories, shaken not stirred. The abstract factory is one of the Gang of Four creational patterns and as the name implies it is concerned with the abstraction of creating. The factory part of this pattern can be
Design Patterns A new year and a new reason I was lying in bed this morning thinking about what I achieved in 2013. Travelled through Southeast Asia, Japan, and China. Walked the last 200km of the “Camino de Santiago”. Travelled around Ireland.
CMS Continuous Integration through a CMS coloured lens Part I Something that I have come to appreciate is continuous integration, for me it all started with an article by Martin Fowler. The idea is to have everyone working from the main line and
Pseudo Code Back to basics For the past two years I have been striving to become a “Software Craftsman“, this has taken re-education on how I approach programming. It has been a roller coaster ride, learning about programming
Names and Namespaces - my dilemma Writing Gravyframe has been a great learning experience. I have been able to experiment with different ways of doing things, but have been at a bit of a dilemma when it comes to
Dependency Injection Gravyframe For the last few months I have been working on a boilerplate and example of how I think a website should be built on top of a .NET CMS. The basic idea is
Umbraco Examine: Indexing and searching with multipart properties One of the features I am building into Gravyframe is news, and one of the features is that news items can be assigned to more than one category. The approach I have taken
