public abstract Gravy : Power

You want to publish when?!

Publishing is a fundamental part of Sitecore and is the concept that I miss most when building websites on other platforms, but did you know that it can be set up to be automated? In the Sitecore configuration, you can find a Sitecore scheduled publishing agent, Sitecore.Tasks.PublishAgent, that

Fish-shell on windows

Start up bash in WSL2 issue the following: bash Install fish-shell sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-3 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install fish Once finished exit and then issues below command: bash -c fish -cur_console:p Once its installed you can set up a fish profile in windows terminal

Sitecore

dimmy Home Delivery

A few weeks ago, I released an open-source project called dimmy and blogged about some of the motivations behind why I started to build a tool. Today I will be sharing with you a walkthrough (warts and all) on how to start with dimmy from scratch. Even though dimmys ultimate

SOLID Principles of Object Oriented Design - D is for Dependency inversion

Monash University MAC Presentation

I gave this talk to the Monash association of coding. Here are the questions that were raised and my attempt to give a good answer: What are your thought on the rise of non OO languages such as python and JavaScript?It comes down to making sure you can write

Sitecore

Dimmy, the Docker Development Dumpling.

It was back in 2015 when I first heard of docker, but it was not until 2017 at my first DDD conference where my mind was opened to its powers. I attended a presentation call "Docker FROM Scratch" presented by Aaron Powell and the way spun up dependent services for

Debug like a boss

Debug Sitecore like a boss

Debug method One: Read the Log FilesEven though sometimes what Sitecore logs out is crap it is still the best starting point, you will start to quickly get a sixth sense of what the most likely causes of issues are. There can be a lot of red herrings so it

SOLID Sitecore

Dependency Injection for Sitecore Pipelines and Pipeline Groups.

If you know me, you are aware of my love of Simple Injector, and if you don't know me, I love Simple Injector. I wanted to use it as the container that resolved a JSS layoutService processor, but the tried and true method of using ref and factory attributes blew

Sitecore

Help I cant personalise on the Referrer

I love it when I get on the tools and start to dig my teeth into an issue. The latest project I have been on has given me opportunities to do this, as you might have noticed from the little wave of blogs over the last few weeks, and this

Sitecore

Cannot parse a valid IP address.

The last blog post I wrote was around and issue with xConnect certs, but what led me to it was an investigation in to malfunctioning Goe-Location personalisation. This post is a continuation of that saga. I have started to create a module that uses the max mind C# libraries, but

Sitecore

The certificate was not found.

I am currently working on a Sitecore project that uses rules to apply personalisation based on a GeoIP lookup using the MaxMind Lite Database, utilising the Rule Engine like this is one of the use cases that makes Sitecore so powerful, unfortunately, I was running into strange behaviour that was

SOLID Principles of Object Oriented Design - D is for Dependency inversion

JuniorDev Code & Tell - Tech Talk Night

On the 20 of February 2019 I gave a presentation at the JuniorDev Meetup. Even though I have given this presentation a few times before both internal to my peers at work and at a Sitecore Meetup I was quite nervous. I wanted to post a video of the presentation

Gitlab, .NET CORE, and Kubernetes Love triangle.

GitLab y u no easy Kubernetes

The first thing we need to do is add a Kubernetes cluster to GitLab. You can do this at the Group level (share cluster between projects) or the project level. The project I am working on has a React application for the Front-end and a Service Stack API for the

Kubernetes

Kubernetes Dashboard

First thing we need to do is install the dashboard on your cluster: kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/dashboard/v1.10.1/src/deploy/recommended/kubernetes-dashboard.yaml The above is lifted form documentation that can be found here. Now the dashboard is installed we need to set

Sitecore

DI container references vs system boundaries.

In my post, Watch your Composition Root, I explore how to empower plugins to be apart of the application bootstrap process. After sharing this two friends of mine, Rob Earlam and Sean Holmesby supplied some feedback. Rob felt I should expand on the why of plugins and Sean made a

Sitecore seven to nine in no time

Target .NET framework

As you can imagine a solution that has been around since Sitecore 7 has 'A LOT' of projects. My first plan was to visit each one and edit the target framework via the properties window, but after the first three projects of about 70, I thought to myself "This

Sitecore seven to nine in no time

Indexes

IndexField could not be found Back in Sitecore 7, this attribute was found in the Sitecore.ContentSearch assembly, as of Sitecore 8 it was moved to Sitecore.ContentSearch.Linq, it is used to map an index field to a POCO property where the names are different, and the default provider

Sitecore seven to nine in no time

Web Forms For Marketers

Sitecore 9 is the beginning of the end for WFFM, thank God. Unfortunately, I am not out of the woods with my upgrade task as a new version was released. A new forms solution called Sitecore Forms looks very promising, and my money is on WFFM moving into maintenance sooner

Sitecore seven to nine in no time

Sitecore Client Customisation

WebEditCommand?! The WebEditCommand class once resided in the Sitecore.Client.dll, as of Sitecore 8.1 it has moved to Sitecore.ExperienceEditor.dll. Issues: The type or namespace name 'WebEditCommand' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) 'xxx.Execute(CommandContext)': no suitable

Sitecore seven to nine in no time

ECM

After working through upgrade issues related to ECM, the number of errors was overwhelming and intent of the customisations unclear, I concluded that pursuing a straight upgrade was not worth the effort involved. If you have many customisations to ECM as this solution did, it might be worth your time

Sitecore seven to nine in no time

Analytics, move over DMS and xDB?!

In Sitecore 7.5 xDB was introduced, this brought new ways of thinking about visitors to your website and tracking their journeys, but it was one big breaking change for solutions that had bespoke analytics code. The unfortunate thing here is more often than not this shift in thinking about

Sitecore

Service Locator Pattern or Anti-Pattern?

For a long time now I have considered the Service Locator an Anti-Pattern, but recently I have come to question this resolve, is it black and white? Maybe not. Mark Seemann first introduced me to the idea of an Anti-Pattern in general with his article Service Locator is an Anti-Pattern,

Sitecore

Two containers are better than one.

Sitecore is a fantastic CMS that does many things right, and from version 8.2 the list also included Dependency Injection. It's great to see the product embrace IoC, the framework's code is using it, training materials include the concept, and the Sitecore community is talking about it. I love

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. Rob Earlam provided me with some feedback that I explain the how of plugins but neglected the

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 it very easy to lose control. So how can we mitigate this? Well, split up your registration

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 Test First I had a hard time changing my mindset, for most of my programming life I