A little PowerShell hack for sending files to a remote machine

I was asked to do some configuration on a remote computer recently, and discovered that the security-concious network admins had locked down the ability for me to share my local computer’s files with the server via RDP and the ability to get to services like OneDrive. I had a collection of config files I had been asked to deploy, and manually creating each file on the server and copying over its contents seemed like a lot of hassle. So I tried a trick with PowerShell to make my life easier…

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Dealing with .tar.gz files on Windows Server

A couple of times recently, I’ve found myself needing to deploy files that come wrapped in a .tar.gz archive onto servers. On your desktop that’s not too much of a problem – you just run the installer for your preferred 3rd party tool, or maybe use the new Unixy shell and you get on with it. But on client servers security can be higher and you don’t always get the option to run any old installer. So I needed an alternative…

Pasting multiple cells into Excel from PowerShell

Sometimes the learning point from working on a misbehaving Sitecore server isn’t related to the CMS. Recently I learned something useful about Excel while I was addressing some other issues. Not sure if this is “so trivially simple I’m just the last one to realise” or whether it’s a really useful bit of trivia – but just because someone else might benefit:

Thinking about errors in code pipelines

A while back I wrote a couple of posts on the subject of how code pipelines can work in a more functional .Net world. I’ve made use of those patterns in some code of my own, and I’ve found these posts have generated quite a lot of questions from readers here and followers on twitter. But I’ve never been quite happy with the implementation in my own code…

Remember the routing if you want to reverse-proxy on a Sitecore site

Ever been asked to set up a Reverse Proxy to allow a particular URL on your website to fetch its content from a site somewhere else? It’s not an uncommon requirement, but it seems to cause some configuration challenges too. Having been drafted in to solve some issues with just such a setup recently, here’s a quick description of the stuff I need to remember next time I get this job:

Community advice for (conference) speakers

So Sitecore Sitecore Symposium is very nearly upon us again. And this year (for the first time!) I’ll be presenting a session. [Unless it gets moved again: Day 2 (Tuesday 9th), 16:15 in Swan 2 – “Measure if you want to go faster” – A developer’s introduction to improving performance by measuring your code]

When this year’s speakers first found out that their talk abstracts had been accepted, there was a bit of discussion on the Sitecore Slack about things speakers might want to know or do. And I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, because there were quite a few things I saw that were worth sharing to help anyone else who’s looking forward to their first opportunity to speak…

Bonus chatter: AMP pages and code snippet hyperlinks…

Here’s a quick memory jogger for me: If you try to validate the AMP versions of blog pages, you may get this error from Google: Invalid URL for HTML attribute 'href' in tag 'a'. What does it actually mean?