Matt - Geekrocket Blog

Blank lines in files generated by T4 templates

Why does my T4 text template (.tt) generate a code file full of empty lines?

Refactoring out SheerResponse calls in Sitecore 8+

Sheer UI was deprecated in Sitecore 8 and has been replaced by the SPEAK framework. Calls to the SheerResponse class should be remapped to the ClientResponse class, for example: Sitecore.Web.UI.Sheer.SheerResponse.Alert("Invalid user."); becomes Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Alert("Invalid user.

.NET

Making legacy Unity code a bit more testable

A current project I'm working on uses Unity to do dependency injection which has created a little bit of a challenge. Much of this code was architected and built several years ago, and generally follows a repository/DAO pattern where: A static InjectionContainer class

.NET

ViewState is not always your enemy

I had to support a legacy Web Forms application and while in the process of cleaning up several existing UserControls I had to explain to another developer exactly why using the ViewState to store custom properties wasn't worse than the current solution - which

Sitecore

Fast session timeouts and Sitecore robot detection

Unfortunately I've seen this issue in two different projects over the last few years. Sitecore uses a visitor identification sublayout to determine whether a site visitor is a bot or an actual human visitor. If you are a bot, your session times out much

Sitecore

Clearing a custom delivery server cache on publish

We have a non-Sitecore custom cache (which follows identical rules on both delivery servers and the authoring server) responsible for building up a hierarchy that is derived from a combination of Sitecore items and data in a custom database. The only trigger that can

Sitecore

Sitecore 8 DateFields are now UTC

After upgrading from Sitecore 7 to Sitecore 8 we started to notice that some of the dates shown across our site (in the format "22 Feb 2016") were showing a date one day earlier than expected. This date is pulled from a DateField on

.NET

Testing non-public methods from another project

I had a few methods in a project that implemented some business logic that I wanted to be able to test from another project, but that weren't public. So how can I test them? Well... A testable method should be relatively self-contained. It should