During the move to Azure PaaS there have been a few instances where we've noticed a series of errors being logged about file I/O issues which often result in instances dying within a PaaS "load balancer". The error will look something like this: Sitecore on Azure PaaS File I/O errors "Too many changes at once in directory:D:\home\site\wwwroot\" Each time I've had to trawl through the Azure Kudo powershell file system view looking for where on earth some files are being written to so I thought I'd share a couple of (seemingly obvious upon reflection)…
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As a 'back in the day' Sitecore developer I used to do more with Sitecore Queries than I'd care to admit. Recently I was looking for a 'good' way to set up a rendering with a default location which worked in a multi-site solution and was playing with Sitecore Queries once again. It occurred to me that the tooling that used to be available is no longer accessible through the Sitecore back end. I did a bit of digging and I located a whole host of useful tooling which I'd known about at some point in the past but which…
I have discussed the Helix design patterns before and I really love their modular approach to code architecture however whilst trying to discuss this with some colleagues and working out the cleanest way to work with Helix and a Multi-site Sitecore solution it occurred to me that if you are familiar with the "Enterprisey" Three-tier design architecture principles, well the same principles can be applied to your Helix development at a modular level. Let's take a look at a super simple example.. Let's say your website has a Feature layer project for "Navigation". In a multisite scenario, you'll likely find…
It's been quite some time since we started our journey using Sitecore 8.2 and Azure PaaS. There has been no small amount of experimentation, failings and most importantly, learnings as we worked towards an automated build and release pipeline using VSTS so I thought I would take the opportunity at long last to share some of my experiences. This was the first time I'd tried using Azure PaaS and to be fair, it was very early days for Sitecore supporting PaaS as well. While using the bleeding edge technologies is fun and exciting, it can result in a lot…
Last month was the start of an exciting new website development project to bring my company's Sitecore website into the current era. I'd been aware of the Sitecore Helix design approach for quite some time and was interested in the idea however this finally afforded me the opportunity to really explore what it was all about while I was shopping around for the right approach to building the new site. Pros of the Helix Design Approach Although there are many design approaches out there in the wild, it's the first time in my memory that Sitecore themselves have released a…
For quite a few months now, my workplace has been looking at moving our website from a fully automated, cloud-based AWS solution over to Azure. Every person I've mentioned this to has had a similar reaction, mostly of disbelief. "AWS is far more mature and robust cloud offering". Comments like this have been made to me numerous times. Hell, I was of the same opinion at first however lets explore some of the reasoning behind this business decision to move to Azure after spending 1.5 years and a considerable amount of money getting to the cloud and…
It's time for a change So after numerous issues with Wordpress, and some inspiration from a Microsoft Ignite 2017 talk, I've decided to finally get around to setting up my new blog using the Ghost.io platform. Why the change? This is something I've been meaning to do for a very long time. My old Wordpress blog was created during 3rd year University as a Research and Development brain dumping ground which at the time was all focused on 3D modelling and animation as well as Game Development. Eventually I started mostly posting about Web Development as things in my…