Figuring things out in the wild worlds of .NET and Node, and writing it down.More
9.0 Update-1: New in xConnect and xDB
Here are some of the key changes made to xConnect and the xDB in the recently released 9.0 Update 1 – including links to documentation. For a full list of changes, see the official release notes. xDB.Tracker identifier available as a constant Any contact that visits your website is given a tracker identifier. The identifier…More
Four agile development practices that benefit the documentation
I work with a team of 30+ developers and QA on a large platform. For the most part, I write the documentation by reverse engineering a feature and acting as its first external consumer. This is a good way of sanity checking design and architecture as well as learning how something works. However: Here are four development…More
What’s in a session: What exactly happens during a session, and how does the xDB know who you are?
Featured image from Wikimedia Commons. This blog post follows on from Let’s Talk About Session State. Now that we understand the role played by session state in the xDB, let’s take a closer look at what exactly happens during a session – and how xDB is able to keep track of us across sessions. But first –…More
Tracker.Current is not initialized
I am writing this for the benefit of anyone else who, like me, goes to Google before checking their logs! When I switched shared session state to OutProc (using the MongoDB provider), I got the following error: Tracker.Current is not initialized Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please…More
Let’s Talk About Session State
Featured photo by Santeri Viinamäki. When the Experience Database (xDB) was released, there was suddenly a lot of information floating around about session state. In this blog post, I will defeat this nemesis of mine by covering: The role played by session state in the xDB What ‘private’ and ‘shared’ session state means The effect your choice of server…More
What is Microsoft Azure?
In this blog post, I will be tackling Microsoft Azure (with a nod towards Sitecore and the Sitecore Azure module). At the time of writing, I am a complete newcomer to Microsoft Azure in general. This blog post assumes that you, like me, know nothing at all about Azure beyond the fact that it has something…More
Generating meaningful sample Sitecore analytics data with JMeter
Note: Although the screenshots I am using are from the Experience Profile interface, which is not publicly available at time of writing, this method will work with older versions of Sitecore as well. Edit (05/08/2014): See comments by Alen, Ivan, and Michael regarding robot detection and forcing session end, as these may affect whether or…More
SPEAK for Newbies – Part 6: SPEAK Helpers
The main SPEAK .js file contains a lot of very useful helpers that you can use in your own applications and components. To remind you, the PageCode component uses require.js to load in a bunch of scripts. The ‘Sitecore’ .js file is highlighted below. The ‘sitecore’ module is used by all page code (and presumably…More
Sitecore’s marketing features for developers: What is ‘Engagement Value’?
If you work as a developer in the Sitecore world, you will probably hear the term engagement value at some point. I did a quick Google (and got a 500 error, which made me think the world was coming to an end, but I’ve recovered from that now) and noticed that the majority of resources…More