The second day of MVP Summit 2016 started with a bit of a rushed breakfast down in the Hyatt lobby with some fellow MVPs. I was wondering whether I should bring my laptop or not to our offsite meetings today, but I decided to lug the bag with us and get down to join folks for the buses. It was about 8am, probably shouldn’t run up to the hotel room. Although, the “depart at 8am” must surely have meant congregate at 8am, right?
I arrived in front of the Hyatt to see one of our buses take off. Apparently, that was the second bus to do so. These folks weren’t messing around! Scrambling onto the last bus, I found a space next to my friend and former colleague Eduardo and we chatted about our respective evenings and what might be ahead of us today. As the spaces on the bus filled up I looked around and noticed that my breakfast buddy Nick Allen still hadn’t arrived, but he scrambled to the door before our driver decided to take off.
A short drive later we arrive at the New Orleans Motor Speedway, a place as awesome as it sounds. The event center is nice and we have a good view of the go-karting track that I can only hope I can crash on later today!
Speaking of crashing…
The poor event center WiFi router was not prepared for the Hungry Hungry Hippo that is a group of 200 MVPs craving their internet fix. Up, down, up, down, up… no reliable connection… I guess SlackChat won’t be distracting me today! 🙂
Nuget goodies
A few weeks back I tweeted about an article I saw pop up in my RSS feed from the doc site about a public Nuget feed.
Today, Kern gave us an overview of the packages and the general plan for using and evolving with Nuget. General Consensus (a.k.a. Sean Holmesby 😉 ) seems to indicate that using the .NoReferences packages in the Visual Studio solution is probably the easiest way to go when transitioning from our current DLL reference model to NuGet. This means that dependent assemblies won’t get pulled in, but I’m not too worried about this. It seems like a nice transition for our project, and with the TDS settings I already use to prevent my deployments from pushing out anything Sitecore-related, the referenced DLLs won’t go anywhere even if NuGet pulled them in.
Dependency Injection
With 8.2, Sitecore released support for Microsoft’s DI framework. Kern gave some of us a quick run-through on what this means, how it looks, and some discussions occurred on using other frameworks and where Sitecore.Context fits into the whole thing (it doesn’t). Having this built-in with Sitecore will eventually allow our team to standardize on a ‘best practice’ for DI that will have an upgrade path supported by Sitecore. In line with this, the Sitecore Solr packages will no longer have the Castle Windsor requirement which means one less ‘out of the box’ piece introduced to the solution.
In my own head, I’m wondering how this will look when we have dependent modules or frameworks that have their own container requirements. That will likely need a PoC!
I also like the new ShowServicesConfig page that seems to be the ShowConfig equivalent for the services registered to the container. Nifty!
Some tables are round
I had some great conversations at and near the Round Tables on Helix, Documentation, Ye Olde Cooke Bookeths, and some nice chats about onboarding new team members to Sitecore development.
Side note: GITHUB ALL THE DOCS!
Crash and Burn
After a brief photoshoot, the MVP group got down to some serious Go-Karting. I had a chance to get two tries at the track and managed to increase my best lap time by 3 seconds, but I clearly need more work on the track, based on some of the amazing times my fellow drivers had.
Pro tip: Spinning out while trying to avoid others does not help your lap time!
This was an amazing way to end the MVP Summit. Thank you Pieter, Marissa, and all of Sitecore!
St-Cyr Thoughts 
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