Symposium recap 2019

This year’s Sitecore Symposium in Orlando has been yet another vibrant edition, packed with inspiring keynotes, educational and in-depth breakout sessions, and a lot of interesting conversations with fellow Sitecore-minded developers, marketers and customers. The amount of breaking news announcements may not have been as high as last year, with Horizon, Cortex, Host, the Stylelabs …

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Azure Gateway for Sitecore

Strong ciphers & SSL termination without ASE Multiple recent pen tests have shown us that Azure Web Apps by default do not support the (strong) SSL ciphers we desire. Not willing to make the jump to the Application Service Environment (ASE) right away, we decided to try and secure our Web Apps using an Application …

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Watch Robbie go headless

Lately, a few colleagues and me were brainstorming about a new concept for a customer, discovering new capabilities, and tinkering about innovations and how they could change the interaction with their users. It isn’t a new topic at all, but what if we could remove most of the user interface and focus on only those …

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Integrated DevOps

Integrated DevOps with Azure, Git, PowerShell & Slack At the Sitecore Symposium 2018 edition I hosted a session about how to optimize the DevOps process around your automated deployments using Azure DevOps, demoing how we got our development environment to the next level of maturity, increasing the developer productivity and fun of our Sitecore software …

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Sitecore Azure scripts update

My colleague Anton Kuryan revamped my Azure scripts, removing duplicate code and adding several new features. Check out https://github.com/robhabraken/Sitecore-Azure-Scripts for the latest version! One parameterized PowerShell script When I first wrote these scripts, I used the Sitecore templates as a starting point, creating multiple folders for the different setups single, double and full (referring to …

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Hot Swappin’

Deploy & swap your Sitecore Azure Web App without downtime This blog post is the product of my cooperation with Mark de Bruijne, senior lead developer at Colours. Mark extended my Azure ARM scripts with the optimizations shown below, based on his research to avoid downtime on swapping, and helped me tremendously with writing this …

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Azure templates update

Since we’re using ARM style provisioning and Sitecore deployments for a while now at Colours, it’s time for an update. First of all, because there were some changes per Sitecore 8.2 Update 3, and secondly, because we have improved our scripts and want to share a few learnings. Check out the new scripts and templates …

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Blue Green Sitecore Deployments on Azure

In my blog post and talks early december, I gave an extensive introduction on deploying and hosting your Sitecore solution on Azure Web Apps; right after the release of Sitecore 8.2 Update 1, which was the first Sitecore version to support Web Apps. Since then, a lot happened. Not only Sitecore released both Update 2 and …

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Sitecore Cloud MVP 2017!

For the second year in a row, I am happy to announce that I have been awarded the Sitecore MVP Cloud award 2017! Yes, that’s right, Cloud! Being one of only 10 Cloud experts worldwide to be named a Sitecore MVP this year, among over 10,000 certified developers in Sitecore’s network globally, is very exciting. As a Technology MVP …

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The Staging slot EventQueue issue

Say what? Having the possibility of using staging slots when moving from on premises to the Cloud was one of the most promising and convenient improvements that could enhance the stability and uptime of our applications. Very exciting! But soon we ran into an issue, both with Cloud Services as with Web Apps: Where we could replicate …

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