Latest articles

  • Baby Steps to SOA: A retrospective on the blog series

    One of the key needs in lean, scrum, and other agile processes is for continuous improvement.  We constantly review how we do things to do them better.  The most common method of doing this is the retrospective.  After 5 months of writing the Baby Steps to SOA series, I decided that I wanted to review… Read more

  • Sitecore: Taking on the Top 10 Reasons to A/B test

    The practice of A/B testing follows the Lean methodology of Build, Measure, and Learn (BML).  By using tools capable of performing these tests, we can build a quick test, measure the interaction with the tests, and learn from the results gathered.  This is fundamental to improving your content and your application. If you’ve been following… Read more

  • Baby Steps to SOA – Step Ten: Riding the ESB

    Baby Steps to SOA – Step Ten: Riding the ESB

    In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. In this final stage, the team moves to using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to handle the inter-application communication. This step allows for an increased ability to manage the disparate… Read more

  • TDS: Deploy failed – “This software is protected to provide copy protection”

    Have you encountered a failure while executing an automated Sitecore deployment with TDS where the type initializer throws an exception and you are asked to reinstall the TDS application?  Apparently, if your TDS installation becomes corrupted somehow, you need to get rid of the web service and let TDS reinstall itself.  This might occur if… Read more

  • Sitecore: Publishing stuck on Initializing after applying Scalability settings

    Sitecore: Publishing stuck on Initializing after applying Scalability settings

    I recently came across this issue after applying some scalability settings, and couldn’t initially figure out why the publishing was no longer working.  Accessing the Desktop and using site publishing would display the dialog, but would hang on the Initializing… stage.  After some preliminary investigation, it turned out that the issue was with the instance names… Read more

  • Baby Steps to SOA – Step Nine: Moving beyond the website

    Baby Steps to SOA – Step Nine: Moving beyond the website

    In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Up next is expanding the use of the new services layers to their other applications within the business.   While focus is usually given to revenue-generating applications, the inclusion of… Read more