Overview of the Commerce 9.1 SIF Installation Process

The Sitecore Commerce installation really puts SIF through its paces, and a number of things can go wrong along the way. Having a clear sense of what the script is doing, how it is structured, what the bumps are, and how to pick thing up after an error can make a big difference, so I thought I'd share my experiences. These notes are based on the Commerce 9.1 installation, though I touch on what has changed since 9.0. I hope to look at the recently released 9.2 installation process in a future post.

Using Powershell to find duplicate IDs in serialized items

On my current project I was troubleshooting a failing integration test that makes use of the Sitecore FakeDB Serialization module, which can declarative load a branch of content directly from the file system. The setup method for this test was reporting a duplicate key exception, so I used PowerShell to identify the culprit.

Readable Tests

There's a great little chapter in Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests on how to write helper methods for building complex test data. The specific techniques are somewhat less relevant in a post AutoFixture world, but the chapter also makes a powerful case that test code should read as English prose.

First steps with SpecFlow and Selenium

I've always been a Unit Testing guy, but reading Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests really brought home the role an acceptance test outer structure can play in an iterative development process.

Zapping Solr Cores with Powershell

Imagine you've been working on a feature that creates Sitecore Solr indexes with SIM. Three's a lot of testing that goes into that.

Disposing of a DLL

So I've been working on a feature for Sitecore Instance Manager to automate installing Sitecore instances with Solr turned on.  This has been pulled in to the Develop branch of SIM and should hopefully hit the downloadable version soon.

NCrunch

If you want to make unit testing and TDD truly addictive, you should look at NCrunch, which basically gives you while-you-type intellisense for unit tests.

Another Look at Sitecore and Unit Testing

At Sitecore Symposium 2016, I will be giving a talk on unit testing in Sitecore. The focus of this talk is on the notion of testability.

Debugging and Creating PDBs with ReSharper

Being able to debug Sitecore code is an important skill for supporting Sitecore solutions.  There have been a number of excellent articles on how to do this, but they typically describe using JetBrains DotPeek product as a "symbol server". (See http://bilyukov.com/debugging-sitecore-dotpeek/, and https://jammykam.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/how-to-debug-sitecore-kernel-in-visual/). An alternative, which I find somewhat simpler, is to use ReSharper to generate PDB files, and place those in your solution bin directory. I will walk you through that approach in this article.

The Pomodoro Technique

There is a special, lonely dread that accompanies a big, complex task. Am I up to it? Is it harder than I think? Am I missing something fundamental? I wonder what's going on on Twitter. Hey, I got retweeted...