Author: Jason St-Cyr
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Previewing as a selected user in Sitecore
Following up on the initial module release of the Sitecore Authenticated Preview module, I have now released version 1.1 for download. In this new version, authors can preview what a page would look like to a specific user by selecting an account on the Experience ribbon. No more guessing as…
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Sitecore 8 Upgrades: ‘Cannot read configuration file because it exceeds the maximum file size’
A warning to others upgrading to Sitecore 8: you may run out of Web.config space! Recently, I’ve been spending my time working on upgrading a site to Sitecore 8 and I encountered the dreaded 250KB limitation for the Web.config file. For security reasons, IIS will throw the “Cannot read configuration file because it…
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4 metrics to measure DevOps improvements
This week I wrote on the Nonlinear Digital blog a piece on DevOps metrics. The goal was to give organization’s 4 easy metrics that they can track to see whether or not the changes they are making to their tools and processes are improving their overall flow through development and operations…
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Using TDS with Visual Studio Online build server
Recently I needed to get builds running in Visual Studio Online (VSO) that contained Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects. Since I cannot install the TDS software on the VSO build server, I needed another way to get these projects to compile with a VSO build definition. The following blog post has…
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Keystone: Considerations when upgrading to Sitecore 7.5 or Sitecore 8
With the releases of Sitecore 7.5 and Sitecore 8 in the last 6 months, there has been a lot of interest from clients in upgrading from their current 6.x versions to the latest and greatest Sitecore platform version. This upgrade process always entails an examination of the modules involved in…
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TDS project compile error: .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found
I was recently working on some deployments that leveraged Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects and began receiving the following error on the build server: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\amd64\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets (990): .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found. In order to target “.NETFramework,Version=v2.0”, .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 or later…
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Why is DevOps so hard?
With agile development teams delivering potentially shippable software every few weeks, organizations struggle with the need to efficiently transition requirements, source code, and deployment steps from the development team to the operations team. Traditional documentation-oriented mechanisms cannot be efficiently kept up to date due to the ever-shifting nature of continuously evolving…
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Sitecore announces 2015 MVPs
I’ve been taking some time off the last few weeks and when I returned to work this week I was happy to see that Sitecore had announced the 2015 MVPS! I was also happy to see my name on the list for the second year in a row! You can…
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Visual Studio Online agile options are opening up
Recently, Aaron Bjork wrote about some of the goodies coming down the pipe for Visual Studio Online (VSO) agile project management options. I still remember my first forays into TFS 2010, trying desperately to use it to manage my agile projects. Needless to say, I was frustrated at the time, but…
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Why you don’t care that .NET is now open source
Back in November, Microsoft made a large announcement that they would be open sourcing the .NET server stack. There were many a Twitter tweet and blog rumblings a-plenty. I’m sure cake was cut, beverages were gulped, and celebratory snacks served to many a happy developer. Yet, amongst the revelry, myself…
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Keystone License – Error “No valid Keystone license can be found”
In addition to keeping up with your Sitecore license, any Sitecore installation running Keystone must also have an active Keystone license present in the web root folder. Otherwise, you will get an error like the following: Keystone License – Error No valid Keystone license can be found. Please ensure the…
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Using an authenticated preview in Sitecore
Do you secure some of your website content from unauthenticated users? If so, you probably noticed that the default Preview mode isn’t working for you. Since Sitecore’s preview mode executes as the anonymous user, your secured content becomes hidden from that user. As an author, you need to be able to see what…
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Setting organizational expectations when implementing Scrum
When a team first transitions to an agile delivery model, the team experiences challenges and frustration as they adopt a new way of thinking and new processes. Often times, teams are told that they are making the change to agile in order to deliver software faster and cheaper, but find…
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TeamCity PowerShell scripts run with “- File” always return exit code zero
Are you finding that your TeamCity Powershell scripts are always returning exit code zero (a success) no matter what happens? Even when an exception is thrown and you can see the error message in your build log? I ran into this problem recently while moving some of my Powershell scripts…
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Keystone: Adding an MVC view to an existing component
Some Keystone components, like the Accordion and Tabs components, have multiple views. This allows developers to have a different markup for different states. For example, you can present a Page Editor view or a specific view if certain pieces of data are missing. Use the following steps to extend Keystone…
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Styling WFFM required fields on submit
Sitecore’s Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) does many things well, but some of the required field styling is a little on the clunky side. For example, if a required field is not filled out by a user, on submit WFFM will display a validation summary at the top of the form with…
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Moving day always brings out the agile practitioner in me
Most of us have had to move ourselves at least once in our lives. We think we have it all planned out, but the true test is when the movers show up (or your friends who were lucky enough to show up and provide free labour). I got to be one…
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Visual Studio Online and Azure deployment
This past Tuesday I attended a Webinar led by ALM Ranger and Microsoft MVP Esteban Garcia (@EstebanFGarcia). The topic? Azure and Visual Studio Online (VSO), specifically around deployments (or so I thought). There was more content in this session than I expected to get, that’s for sure! My primary goal in…
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Keystone for Sitecore: Extending template entities
The Keystone for Sitecore business layer provides generated template entities for each page and component template. These entities provide properties to access each field with a strongly-typed value, as well as properties for template identifiers, field identifiers, and field names. As you extend the Keystone templates and add new fields, you will…
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Sitecore MVC: Editable links wrapping text and images
In transitioning from Sitecore Web Forms sublayouts to Sitecore MVC renderings, there are some things that have to be done a little differently. In this post, we’ll examine the scenario of wanting to provide authors with the ability to edit text or an image inside of an editable link. Credit goes to @mhwelander…
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Agile in the Iron Triangle
Many of us are valiantly in the trenches trying to bring agile practices to our teams, clients, and organizations. Others have heard the buzz over the last decade and are starting to make their first steps. Either way, you need to remember that some issues never go away. The old constraints of…
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Introducing the Keystone resource category!
Have you just started with Keystone for Sitecore? Getting your feet wet and have questions? As one of the architects involved in the building of the Keystone development accelerator, I am starting up a new section of this site to provide regular posts on areas of interest, hidden nuggets, and…
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Sitecore MVP Summit 2014: Return of the Jedi
The week in Vegas culminated with the gathering of all the North American Sitecore MVPs for the 2014 MVP Summit. Starting off with a solid breakfast was a must for most of the group, especially those who had stayed out until the wee hours of the morning. If a coffee…
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Sitecore Symposium 2014 Day 3: The closing sessions
After a busy day of tracks on Day 2 followed by a late party at the club, Wednesday’s sessions seemed to be starting a little early for pretty much everybody. 🙂 My plan for Wednesday was to see a few key sessions and spend more time meeting folks at the booth, so…
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Sitecore Symposium 2014 Day 2
Day 2 of the SYMNA held much excitement as the keynotes and tracks kicked off with a bang (or at least with dancing). Michael Seifert delivered an excellent opening keynote to set the tone for the day (say “Experience” one more time) which entirely focused on learning the complete context…
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Sitecore Symposium 2014: Time to Keystone!
With just 8 hours of flights between myself and Vegas, the excitement was starting to build. Our team was coming out in full force this year to watch some great sessions, meet awesome people, and show off Keystone at our booth! After years of building up an accelerator internally to deliver our…
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Visual Studio Online Stakeholder licensing is live
A few weeks back, I mentioned that Visual Studio Online was making some licensing changes to better integrate the greater project team into the tool, and the Stakeholder licensing changes have been announced as live this past week. Of course this happened while I was away on vacation!
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A verdict on Sitecore Training and Certification
A colleague of mine, Jason Carter, who recently went through Sitecore training, offered some insights into the training on a recent post of his. I thought this particularly well-timed given my recent post on topics not covered during Sitecore training. Check it out: Sitecore Training and Certification Exam
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Don’t Fight The Framework Pt V – Sitecore’s built on Sitecore so build your site on Sitecore.
Originally posted on CardinalCore: This one will be a relatively quick one ( hopefully before the girlfriend finds out I am working on our holiday 😉 ). Continuing on in the Don’t Fight The Framework series, I thought I would discuss a topic that has kind of formed the more…
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Going Lean: Tips from the trenches
Continuous refinement is always in need when working in an agile delivery framework. The first thing you learn when you adopt a framework is that it does not work for all situations. Scrum, like other models, works really well in particular development situations. Sometimes, however, you need to transition your team…
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5 things Sitecore training won’t prepare you for
This past week I had the pleasure of pair programming with a new member of our team at nonlinear. I don’t say that sarcastically, as it actually was a lot of fun to bring another person into the fold, fresh off of Sitecore certification. It’s also been a while since…
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Clearer requirements through Sitecore prototyping
Recently, my colleagues and I were about to embark on a mission to gather requirements for an upcoming release. We had already worked with this particular client and therefore knew that they would have a solid understanding of their existing solution, if not the full capabilities of the Sitecore platform.…
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Using subfolders for Sitecore config files
Recently, I’ve been changing the organization method I’m using when architecting builds for my clients. Sitecore supports automatically patching in include files from subfolders of App_Config\Include, which allows for architecting project-specific overrides and environment-specific settings in a much cleaner manner. Kamruz Jaman just wrote a great post about this on Friday. The…
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Upcoming VS Online licensing changes greatly helping Microsoft’s position
Last week, Brian Harry announced on his blog some upcoming changes to the Visual Studio Online licensing. Word is that the changes should be coming in the next few months (an August-like timeframe is mentioned). The announced changes are going to be a great help in positioning Microsoft against some of…
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WCF and CORS: “No ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ header is present on the requested resource”
If you are building an Angular app (or other form of HTML5 web application) you are probably running controllers on JSON data to bind to repeaters and present to your users. In many examples, this is usually set up with static data, or a local file, but inevitably you will…
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Visual Studio and Git error: “URI formats are not supported”
Recently, while trying to synchronize with my Visual Studio Online git repository, the Visual Studio Git plugin started displaying the error “URI formats are not supported” while attempting to execute a pull operation. This appears to be an issue introduced with Update 2, and at least from my own experience…
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Sitecore 7: Ensuring IQueryable ordering with string fields
I hadn’t had the chance to really play around with the indexing options in Sitecore 7 until this past week when I needed to build a listing page from an index and sort it by the page title. At first, I just couldn’t get it to work. The ordering never seemed…
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Using MongoLab to manage your MongoDb instances
If you have been looking at getting into using document-oriented storage, you have probably looked at the variety of NoSQL offerings such as CloudDB, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. These databases are built for scalability, performance, and high availability, tailored for gathering large quantities of data in a reliable manner. My personal preference…
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Sitecore tips for upgrading and development
The last week has been very busy around the office and we managed to get out some helpful tips for those of you working with Sitecore for the first time, as well as folks who may be considering a Sitecore upgrade for their current installation. Trying to get started with…
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Federated Identity in Visual Studio Online
This great post by Mitch Denny provides insights into federating Visual Studio Online using Azure Active Directory. The techniques described for enabling the federation without exposing either organization’s internal directories is of great use for consultant/integrator groups who are working with multiple clients and need to protect their information.
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Sitecore 7.1: CSRF form field is missing
During a review of a solution we were delivering on Sitecore 7.1 Update 2 (rev 140324), our Page Editor dialogs no longer allowed users to expand tree lists when adding components. On the server, the logs were showing a CSRF exception, specifically that a CSRF form field was missing. 6708 16:19:44…
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How I know a project plan is total nutbars… and how it can be fixed
We have all seen the magical project plans that have no grounding in reality. Schedules are far too aggressive, scope is beyond what the team can handle, not enough resources available to properly run the team… all to meet some magical “hard deadline” that has been imposed seemingly without any…
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Sitecore publishing: what does it mean?
Over time, our team has realized that when we are speaking to a client about publishing in Sitecore, we may not all be talking about the same thing. There really are three “publish” contexts that a client may be referring to: workflow approval, web database publishing, and content delivery cache clearing. Trying…
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4 ways to change so you can deliver more often
I am a big fan of continuous delivery and deployment. You might have seen me write about it a few times before. When I first bring the idea up with clients, there is hesitation. One might even call it fear. The benefits are huge, allowing you to reap the return on…
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How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes
For the last year or so, I’ve been living in a mostly Atlassian world: JIRA OnDemand, BitBucket, SourceTree… likely more before the year is done. Sure, I still use our on-premise TFS 2010 at work along with Visual Studio of various editions, but my ALM world has really been rocked by…
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4 Tips for Optimizing Incremental Sitecore Content Publishing
For the past few years, I have not been a big fan of incremental publishing. In fact, I’ve often recommended if there was one publishing mode to never use, it was incremental publishing. I didn’t know all the facts, but the truth was that every time I tried to implement…
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Getting started with Agile ALM for Sitecore
Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to iteratively improve our own processes at nonlinear to deliver better Sitecore solutions and set our clients up for maintainable and sustainable ALM processes. Some of my posts on automated Sitecore deployments with TFS or TeamCity outlined some of the initial steps we…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Conditional sublayout logic
In a previous post, I discussed handling the continuous deployment of templates and layouts, but mentioned that you also need to worry about conditional business logic in your sublayouts. The primary issue is this: if the data model is constantly in flux and the system is in a state of…
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Sitecore 7.2: Related Item Publishing
A lot of new stuff dropped in Sitecore 7.2, so our team started taking a look at some of the bits that interested us most. I did a little bit of testing and review of the new related item publishing enhancements, and they are quite nice. Peek on over at…
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Et tu brute? Of cargo cults and agility…
I’m not sure what triggered it, but at some point while I was on vacation a few folks started getting really ticked off about the state of “Agile” these days. People adhering to rules or tools, not understanding what it means to bring agility to a project, or building giant…
St-Cyr Thoughts 