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

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