Solr Cores and Custom Indexes

My adventures with Solr continue!  I was working recently on a feature that required sorting results by the value of a field of a linked item.

Solr Core Discovery

I did a walk-through post awhile back on setting up Solr as a Sitecore 7 index provider.  One of the steps involved defining a "core" (also refered to as a "collection") to hold the indexes.  The way I described is no longer required, as of Solr 4.4, and will no longer work with Solr 5.  (Solr is currently on release 4.6.1).

Social Connected's SynchronizeData Task

This came up while I was putting together demos for my talk. I wanted to click a Like button, and see if I could get it to trigger a change in personalized content, without having to log back in. This might be helpful for keeping profile information current on browsers such as Chrome that keep you logged on forever.

A Quick Look at Git Submodules

I'm a big Git freak, as anyone who knows me knows.  Still, parts of Git scare me.  I only just got comfortable with rebasing (really worth learning, by the way) and submodules had been lurking on my "must learn someday" stack for a while.

Hold On, the Robot Wants to Say Something

Today was a work from home day, as I had to pick up my 5th grader after a week of Science camp.  I'm in the final couple of weeks on a project, and we have daily bug triage meetings to get the release out the door.  I IM'd my project manager asking whether I should dial in to a conference bridge or have him just call my cell.  "Why don't you use AVA?" he asked.

Starting on Roy Osherove's TDD Course

I've just started working my way through Roy Osherove's on-line series on TDD, and I'm impressed out of how much I've gotten out of the first hour.  Just the discussion of what values to put into a test was an eye-opener.

In the Agile Trenches (Part 1)

I've been interested in test driven development for a number of years, and recently it has become central to how I do software development.

Setting up Solr with Sitecore 7

This is a brief walk through for people who have heard the buzz (can you say "scales to billions of documents"?) about Solr and Sitecore 7 and want to get it working on their desktop.  This is based on the instructions in Sitecore's Search Scaling Guide, with a few details about the initial Solr install filled in.

A Peek at Sitecore 7

The part that got me most excited about becoming an MVP this year was the chance to see “technical previews of Sitecore software,” and I started feeling like a kid on December 24th when John West’s blog posts on Sitecore 7 started appearing.

Thoughts on ASP.NET MVC

I've been digging in to ASP.NET MVC recently, and have come away quite impressed.  So I thought it would be worthwhile to capture some impressions, and answer the question: "Why should I be looking at this?"