Hang on, memory leaks? But this is .net where memory leaks are a thing of the past. If you've never done C or C++ before, then you've probably never had the enjoyment of searching through your code looking for memory leaks. A memory leak is memory an application allocates, but doesn't deallocate when it's done with it. .net solved this issue by not letting the developer manage the memory of the...
I experienced a very weird issue the other day that was to do with the preview interface. When I set a publish restriction by date on a particular item for a future date, although the preview interface respected the date restriction, when I changed the preview date it's as if the interface ignored the date. No matter what I changed the preview date to, the interface wouldn't show me my item. Now,...
In a recent post, Phil Heltewig announced the Sitecore Australian and New Zealand users group (SCAUG although this is being changed to include our New Zealand members to SCANZUG). This is a community run group to support anyone who develops in or uses Sitecore in the Australia and New Zealand region. And who should it be headed up by? Well, that would be me :) . Although this group is for people...
Recently I had to integrate Sitecore with an external application written in PHP. The integration included making the PHP application appear inside the Sitecore desktop, so it would appear to the end user that the external application was actually a part of Sitecore. Now, this is actually quite easy to do as we can make any ASPX page an application inside the Sitecore desktop. An application...
This is another post which starts out with me reading another post :) . I was reading the Molten Core blog which is written by Thomas Eldblom (fellow MVP) and Jens Mikkelsen. Thomas published a post in which he points out the large number of PNG icon files included in Sitecore. Sitecore contains an extensive icon library consisting of 1,000's of files. And each of these files is provided in...
I was reading a post by Alex Shyba recently which showed how you can get workflow history using the Sitecore API. This post reminded me of a post I was going to write a while ago on the subject of the workflow APIs. At the bottom of the above post, Alex points out that you could use the code in a workflow email action to get the history and send an email to the user who submitted the item into the...
Well, it's official. Today Sitecore made a press release about this years MVPs. And I am so proud to finally be able to say that I am now a Sitecore MVP. I join 12 others from the wider Sitecore community who have all been named MVPs by Sitecore. Read the press release for more details on what the MVP program is, and how we all ended up there. So onto the congrats and thanks! Congratulations to...
So. 2008. What a year! We've seen a lot of activity from Sitecore this year. We had the Beta program for the new Sitecore codenamed Crestone which was later released as Sitecore 6. This version of Sitecore is the most polished to date (as you would expect). The Sitecore product just keeps getting better and I keep having fun using it.
Back in the pre Sitecore 5.3 days I would sometimes prefer to use Firefox when logging into the Sitecore desktop. Firefox was much faster than IE for this interface, and especially if I was looking at a slow implementation Firefox would help ease some frustration. The desktop didn't look exactly as it should in Firefox, which is probably why Sitecore revoked support for the Sitecore desktop for...
A few weeks ago Alex de Groot asked the Sitecore community, through a post on his blog, what we want to see in Sitecore. How would we improve it? What features are we missing? So rather than comment on his post, I am posting my response here. Hopefully it will invoke some thought and others will post their Sitecore wishlists for all too see and talk about. Below, in no particular order, is my...
When developing Sitecore solutions I use Revolver a lot. I find it easier and quicker at times to do things in the command prompt than clicking through the beautiful UI. So here's a bit of a list of common scenarios I use Revolver for. Most of the scripts below utilise the find command. By far I think the ability to execute the same command against a set of items is the biggest benefit. You can...
I first heard about Haml (XHTML Abstraction Markup Language) early this year on Alexey's blog. At first I thought "What's the point?". After all, HTML is easy to understand and is itself a markup language. Why do I need a markup language for a markup language? But when you start writing in this higher level language everything starts to zen. I have started to become a fan of significant...
I had the above error the other day when using a new install of Sitecore. At first the error doesn't seem to reveal much, and it quite ... generic :) . This was happening when I was trying to create a new rendering through the developer centre in the Sitecore desktop. The full error was: And the error is logged in the log file as well. Exception:...
Well. When I started writing this multi-part series on automated testing and Sitecore I never intended for it to flow over into 8 parts. But I think what I've covered in this series are the fundamental pieces any developer requires to be able to affectively automate their tests for Sitecore code. So, now that we're at the end of the series, I'll leave you with some tips. Don't get hung up on...
In the previous part of this series we covered testing the static output and behaviors of Sitecore presentation components such as rendering, layout and sublayout. But what about testing the dynamic behaviors of a component, such as "what happens when I push the button?", or "did my javascript make the ajax call to grab the content from the CMS?". In this part of the series...
In this installment we'll cover testing the static behaviors and presentation of our other Sitecore presentation components; layouts, sublayouts and renderings. These components are more difficult to test as they need to be hosted inside a Sitecore page to allow testing them. Because these components will be hosted in a page, we will be making web requests to the server to get the page output,...
For a long time I've been a huge fan of .net remoting. Once you got your head around the architecture, it is a really nice technology to use when you need to make calls across applications. In the past I have done this straight out of Sitecore with no problems. The general scenario involves 2 Sitecore servers setup in a master / slave configuration where the master server is the content authoring...
In the last part of this series we started to write tests around code which uses the Sitecore API. These tests were run inside the NUnit custom test runner we wrote back in part 3 of this series. In this post, we'll start testing our presentation components, starting with the easiest to test, which is a Sitecore WebControl. This is any class which inherits from Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControl. The...
Last night I uploaded the Quicklaunch toolbar which I created a few months ago into the Shared Source section of SDN. So hopefully more people will now be able to find it. You can check it out by following http://trac.sitecore.net/QuickLaunchToolbar/wiki. It is also listed on the SDN at http://sdn5.sitecore.net/Resources/Shared%20Source/Shell%20Extensions/Quick%20Launch%20Toolbar.aspx. You'll find...
So far in this series we have covered some of the theories and techniques required to automate testing of Sitecore components, creating a custom NUnit test runner which runs inside the Sitecore website and exposes the Sitecore context to the running tests and how to programmatically setup our test environment for repeatable testing against know content structures. In this post we are going to...