Author Archives: Bas Lijten

How to deploy Sitecore web deploy packages using the VSTS Azure App Service task

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With the introduction of the Sitecore 8.2, Sitecore also introduced some Sitecore web deployment packages (WDP), which are used by the Sitecore-Azure-Quickstart-Templates for the deployment of Sitecore. When using ARM templates to provision the Sitecore Infrastructure and deploy the Sitecore application, this works fabulously. But when there is a requirement to use the VSTS Azure App Service deployment task, these packages can’t be used, due to two reasons. This blogpost explains why this task can’t be used and how to fix it (and explains why I spend a lot of time on writing a custom deployment script)

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Gotchas while installing Sitecore 9 using the Sitecore installation framework

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Sitecore released a nice Installation framework to install Sitecore, xConnect and configure Solr. I used this framework already a few times (on a few machines and it turned out that I am very proficient in breaking things. Especially Sitecore 9). During this installation I faced some inconvenient issues (and found out some tips) which I wanted to share with you. This should help you getting up and running even faster!

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Solr: Error creating SolrCore when using the Sitecore installation Framework

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Today I experienced an error while installing Sitecore 9 using the Sitecore installation framework:

“Install-SitecoreConfiguration : Error CREATEing SolrCore ‘xp0_xdb’: Unable to create core [xp0_xdb] Caused by: null”

Setting the verbose logging option didn’t help and my tries to manually reproduce the issue didn’t work out as well; Or the core was successfully created or I got an error message that the core was already created.

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Enable federated authentication and configure Auth0 as an identity provider in Sitecore 9.0

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Sitecore 9.0 has shipped and one of the new features of this new release is the addition of a federated authentication module. I wrote a module for Sitecore 8.2 in the past (How to add support for Federated Authentication and claims using OWIN), which only added federated authentication options for visitors. Backend functionality was a lot harder to integrate, but I am glad that Sitecore took the challenge and solved it for both the front- and backend. It means that I can get rid of the old code and finally can use the out of the box solution provided by Sitecore. They created a very pluggable solution which can basically register any kind of authentication module via the OWIN middleware. This blogpost will show how I integrated the Identity broker Auth0 with Sitecore. Auth0 is a platform which can act as an Identity Broker: it offers solutions to connect multiple identity providers via a single connection. Code is available at my github repository:

PS: in this example I use Auth0 as Identity broker for Facebook and Google. It’s of course possible to connect directly to Google and Facebook, I just chose not to do this.

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A new Sitecore version has shipped, save your ass(emblies)

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With the release of Sitecore 9.0 at the Sitecore Symposium, a lot has changed. We saw very interesting improvements on Marketing automation, new products like xConnect and Cortex and the new installation framework. With the new release, new assemblies and versions will be shipped, while others are removed. It’s important to update your references to these new versions in your projects, so you won’t overwite the shipped assemblies with other versions. I made a quick overview on what has changed:

  • Which assemblies have been removed?
  • Which assemblies have been added?
  • Which assemblies had a version change?
  • What are the most important observations?

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Sitecore Profiling and tracing without an administrator or developer role

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When working on Sitecore projects, there will popup some situations where you want to indicate performance issues. The out of the box capabilities are great, but the require a development role or and administrator account. While this might work in a lot of situations, there are situations where this just isn’t possible. For example, when having one ore more (virtual) extranet users which don’t have the Sitecore developer role and whose identities are needed to make backend calls. Performance issues might appear in those backend calls, but it may be hard to indicate where those performance sinks are located. That’s why I created a solution where the out of the box profiling and tracing options can be used, for any user.

The solution is available on github

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Revealing Robbie at the Sitecore SUGCON 2017 – Windows IoT, Raspberry PI, Cognitive Services

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Today, Rob Habraken, andI have launched our newly and secretly built project at SUGCON Europ 2017. Something that never has been done before: a real robot that moves, interacts, communicates and executes tasks, fully driven by Sitecore XP, using additional techniques like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Face Recognition and Emotion Detection.

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Zero downtime deployments with Sitecore on Azure

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From a business perspective, downtime is not desirable, ever. And if possible, you want to deploy as often as possible, even multiple times a day Maybe even 50 times a day for complex multi-instance  environments. And if there would be any downtime, that should be during nights, as most visitors would be asleep at that time. From a technical perspective, deployments should occur during business hours: all the developers and administrators are working during these hours, thus issues (if any) could be resolved as every engineer would be available.

We all know about this story, but how many organizations really implement this scenario? This blogpost will show what challenges exist when deploying web applications and how easy it is to implement zero downtime for Sitecore on Azure. The move to Azure not only opens up opportunities for automatic scaling (please make sure to watch his video as well!), but also offers possibilities for enhanced continuity! This blog post does not show off how to integrate with Visual Studio Team Services and Microsoft Release Manager, that will probably be a future topic. Don’t want to read? Watch this video!

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Use the Sitecore Azure toolkit to deploy your on premises environment

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Let’s face it: a lot of customers won’t deploy to Azure immediately, but will have a migration to Azure on their roadmap for the next year. It’s wise prepare as much as possible to make the transition smooth. This blogpost shows off how what the differences between the current Azure and classic on-premises are and how to create custom web deploy packages for your on premise environments, to be in line with a possible future upgrade to Azure. It will make your local deployments repeatable while making use of Microsoft standards. Additional advantage: Your (initial) deployments may happen faster!

See the video below where I explained what I did

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Sitecore on Azure: Create custom web deploy packages using the Sitecore Azure Toolkit

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In my previous blogpost I described how the Sitecore Azure Toolkit works and how to create web deploy packages. In this this blogpost I’ll explain how to create your own web deploy package configurations which can be used on Azure and on-premises, even with Sitecore versions older than Sitecore 8.2 update 1. You can apply role specific configurations, or add custom modules like Coveo, PowerShell Extensions, Unicorn, or even one you package up. Using these techniques will help you establish a repeatable process with standard tooling leading to decreased deployment time. How cool would it be to have Continuous Delivery and Deployment all the way to production?! I’ll demonstrate in an example, Sitecore PowerShell Extensions, how to work towards a continuous delivery process. As a bonus I’ll package Unicorn as well – future posts will depend on this example so why not tackle them now.

special thanks to Rob Habraken, Michael West and Kam Figy who reviewed this post!

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