Watch your Blobs when upgrading to v9.3

I’ve been spending a bit of time helping out a client who’s working through an upgrade project recently, and the work to move from v9.1 to v9.3 raised an interesting issue I wasn’t aware of. So in the spirit of making life easier for others, here’s what happened:

SolrCloud with Sitecore 10

A while back I wrote about some initial investigations I’d made towards having SolrCloud in a containerised Sitecore instance. Since I worked on that, Sitecore have shipped their “official” container approach, so I’ve revisited my experiments using the examples Sitecore provides.

When you don’t pay enough attention to the docs…

…it’s easy to get your fingers burned. I was looking at an issue with personalisation recently, which reminded me that those little details in the docs, which change between versions can often be the most important ones.

A tool to help you build config patches

Recently, I caught sight of a discussion in Sitecore Slack where the lack of tooling for helping you build config patch files came up. For some reason that struck a chord with me, and having mulled over it a bit, I decided I’d have a go at making something to see if it could be done…

Docker and LinkManager playing nicely…

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?

Reformatting config XML so it’s easier to diff

Every so often pretty much every developer ends up in a situation where they’re looking at a bug that manifests on one platform, but not on another. The sort of bug where you end up spending hours looking through log and config files for a subtle difference. I found myself looking into just this sort of bug recently, but on a site where (to my frustration) the config files were full of comments and whitespace differences across platforms that made diffing really hard^**. Spotting that subtle bug-causing difference is pretty much impossible when your diff is full of noise… So how can we fix that?

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:

You can have “Solr as a Service” now…

Recently I was writing about the changes to Java licensing that Oracle are enforcing in 2019. It’s not an uncommon reaction to the challenges that the new license introduces to start thinking about alternatives to how you might manage search for your Sitecore deployments. So what can you do?

Why are my pages under /services/ broken?

This is one of those issues where I feel like I should have worked it out faster than I did. Computers are relentlessly logical. If you tell them to ignore something, they’re going to ignore it, even if that does confuse your content editors…

A fast query edge case that might bite you

There’s been a bit of discussion (I might even go as far as to say ranting 😉 ) on the subject of not using “fast query” in your website code recently. I’m a supporter of this idea – but I came across an issue recently that points out why it’s not always easy to be confident that you’re not making use of it indirectly…

So, for the benefit of Google: