Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Episerver Developer

Transcription

1 25 th October 2017 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer Moderator: Marc Erodotou Presenter: Mark Price Presenter: Mark Price Moderator: Marc Erodotou Copyright AB 1

2 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer Agenda 1.Follow good practices to build a solid foundation 2.Understand benefits and requirements of DXC Service 3.Implement new CMS 10 features 4.Plan for CMS 11 breaking changes 5.Explore PropertyList Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 1. Follow good practices to build a solid foundation Overview Avoid expensive mistakes with DI and unit testing Avoid ServiceLocator.Current even though you see it a lot in Alloy! Use constructor parameter injection or Injected<T> whenever possible. Design decisions: when to use partial pages or blocks. Implement covariant generically-typed view models for layouts and views. Deployment with load balancing and recommended configuration. Manually change or enable: Remote events configuration Indexing service configuration Securing front-end servers Caching of static application and asset files Takeaways: Do NOT assume Alloy shows best practice for all types of site. Do NOT assume the Web.config created with a new project template is best practice! Copyright AB 2

3 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 1. Follow good practices to build a solid foundation Development versus production configuration Editor Server Load Balancer Visitor Server Visitor Server IIS IIS Programmer s Laptop IIS Express IIS Scheduled Jobs LocalDb BLOBs + Index Database Server File Server Index Server SQL Server BLOBs WCF REST + Index 5 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 2. Understand benefits and requirements of DXC Service Overview Best of both worlds for DevOps Managed Services Team handles operations (typically 50% of IT spend) Self-management portal to take control of the deployment process Advanced features Automatic failover to actively geo-replicated site in second datacentre for zero disruption to visitors Encrypted data-at-rest to enable compliance with legal requirements like GDPR EU Directive Only pay for what you use Consumption model instead of per-server license model Page views measured over the whole year, not month-to-month Copyright AB 3

4 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 2. Understand benefits and requirements of DXC Service DXC Service system requirements Features not supported in DXC: CMS Mirroring Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Search (uninstall the NuGet package to remove from your solution prior to deployment). Add-ons not supported in DXC: CMO, Mail, Relate, Social CMS, Social Commerce, Social Intranet. Social and A/B Test add-ons are available for DXC Service and replace some of these older add-ons. Apply for a trial account for Social: See the detailed table of minimum required versions for products and modules: 7 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 2. Understand benefits and requirements of DXC Service Deployment and development Understand DXC Service s three environments and the deployment process How to avoid the problems caused by Microsoft Publish tools Configuration needed to work with DXC Service How to use Web.config transformations with Application settings Implementing continuous delivery with VSTS or Team City and Octopus Development considerations Implement Find; DXC-S includes an Find license Implement multisite; DXC-S includes an unlimited multisite license Implement transient fault handling and queue design patterns to improve reliability and availability Takeaway: Design your on-premise sites today to be ready for DXC Service in the future. Hosting on DXC Service can require some design and implementation changes due to its technology and architecture, for example, all servers have identical configuration. Copyright AB 4

5 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 3. Implement new CMS 10 features Content Approvals Released with CMS 10.8 in April 2017 Group reviewers support added with CMS in June 2017 A/B Testing Test all content types Built-in conversion goals (KPIs) Developers can create their own KPIs Forms Features like encryption for GDPR EU directive compliance: Takeaway: re-energise your Editors, Marketers, and Merchandisers by making the most of the latest features in CMS 10. and don t forget older features like Visitor Groups for segmented personalization. Developers can quickly and easily create custom visitor group criteria to integrate with external systems for personalization. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years. Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer 4. Plan for CMS 11 breaking changes Goal 1: Split assemblies into.net Standard 2.0-compatible and non-.net Standard 2.0-compatible packages. Takeaway: Target.NET Framework or later to be compliant with.net Standard 2.0 Goal 2: Separate dependent technologies into their own packages to create a slimmer core and prepare for replacement in the future: StructureMap, TinyMCE, XForms, Dynamic Content. Takeaway: stay up-to-date with continuous releases and make note of our warnings about APIs that will become obsolete. CMS 11 will include performance improvements up to 50% when content is loaded from the database. Read this blog article for a detailed list of other changes: Copyright AB 5

6 5. Explore PropertyList IList<T> Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer public class Person { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public DateTime? BirthDate { get; set; } } List of simple types, like string, int, DateTime, full built-in support in CMS 11. List of complex types, like Person, Employee, and so on, BETA support in CMS 11. Developers need to implement serialization for the custom PropertyList type and apply an editor descriptor to each property or register one for the custom IList<T> type. [PropertyDefinitionTypePlugIn(DisplayName = "List of people i.e. IList<Person>", Description = "An editable list of Person instances.")] public class PropertyPersonList : PropertyList<Person> [EditorDescriptor(EditorDescriptorType = typeof(collectioneditordescriptor<person>))] public virtual IList<Person> People { get; set; } Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer Summary 1.Follow good practices to build a solid foundation 2.Understand benefits and requirements of DXC Service 3.Implement new CMS 10 features 4.Plan for CMS 11 breaking changes 5.Explore PropertyList 6.Bonus Tip: Get Certified! CMS 10 exam available now. CMS 11 exam coming soon Copyright AB 6

7 Thank you A survey will launch after the webinar. You will receive a follow up with links to recording and downloads for slides and code. 13 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer CMS Development Fundamentals course agenda (3 days in classroom) Introduction Module A: Getting Started with CMS Module B: Defining Page Types and Templates Module C: Rendering Content Module D: Working with Blocks Module E: Navigating Content Module F: Working with Framework Module G: Optimizing, Securing, and Deploying Course Summary 14 Copyright AB 7

8 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer CMS Development Fundamentals e-learning course pages of course materials, including detailed explanations and step-by-step guided exercises multiple choice questions to check your understanding hours of video content, including feature demonstrations and walk-throughs of the step-by-step guided exercises Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer Boot Camps are most efficient method to learn CMS; about half of attendees pass the exam on their first attempt at the exam by attending the Boot Camp. Course tracks Developer courses CMS Development Fundamentals (3 days) CMS Advanced Development (3 days) CMS Developer Boot Camp (5 days) Developing for DXC Service (1 day) Boot Camps are classroom only, so you can get questions answered immediately from instructor. Commerce Development Fundamentals (3 days) Commerce Advanced Development (3 days) Commerce Developer Boot Camp (5 days) CMS Development Fundamentals (3 days) Commerce Development Fundamentals (3 days) CMS & Commerce Fundamentals (5 days) Find for Developers (1 day) 16 Copyright AB 8

9 Top 5 Tips to Excel as an Developer Who am I? Mark J. Price, mark.price@episerver.com 25+ years consulting, trained thousands of developers Certified Developer (CMS 9) since July 2016 Passed 75+ Microsoft developer exams since 1993 Author of C# 7.1 and.net Core 2.0 3rd edition Module B Defining Page Types and Templates Dependency Injection (DI) Getting a service using the locator or using Injected<T> field 1. ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<T>: manually retrieve the provider for the service T. IContentLoader loader = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IContentLoader>(); var page = loader.get<pagedata>(contentreference.startpage); Strictly-speaking, ServiceLocator is not DI, and should be avoided, as explained in the following article: 2. Injected<T>: define a field that will be automatically instantiated. private Injected<IContentLoader> injectedloader; public void SomeMethod() { var page = injectedloader.service.get<pagedata>(contentreference.startpage); } 18 Copyright AB 9

10 Module B Defining Page Types and Templates Dependency Injection (DI) Getting a service using constructor parameter injection 3. SomeController(T param): constructor parameter injection. Warning! This third option requires StructureMap or some other dependency resolver to be configured. This is the best option for making it easy to unit test and remove dependencies. private readonly IContentLoader loader = null; public MuppetPageController(IContentLoader loader) { this.loader = loader; } public void SomeMethod() { var page = loader.get<pagedata>(contentreference.startpage); } 19 Module B Defining Page Types and Templates Design patterns and conventions Using view models An alternative to having a view model is to add [Ignore] to properties in the page type. This prevents them from being stored in the CMS. Frequently you need more than just the page object in your view, so it is common to create a ViewModel class. Create an interface and use inheritance so that your strongly-typed models can be passed to your layouts as well as the views. Interface and base class: public interface IPageViewModel<out T> where T : SitePageData { T CurrentPage { get; } public class PageViewModel<T> : IPageViewModel<T> where T : SitePageData IPageViewModel<SitePageData> PageViewModel<AlloyDemo.Models.Pages.StartPage> 20 Copyright AB 10

11 Module D Working with Blocks Overview When to use a partial page or a block Does the content need a public reference? Might a visitor want to bookmark the content? Pages and media have URLs for public references; blocks do not. Is the content website functionality? For example: Share this on Facebook/Linked, a dynamicallygenerated list of content, or a quiz component? Website functionality should be implemented as blocks. Do you want to tease page content to draw a visitor deeper into your website? All page types that you want to be able to promote by adding them to a content area should have a partial template. If a page is promoted by using a block, this will create an overhead for the editor since they need to manage the block as a separate item in parallel with the page. One of the points of a CMS is to be able to create an item of content once, and renderer it in different scenarios. 21 Module B Deploying to DXC Service Continuous Integration Build and deployment tools Visual Studio Publish, Problem 1 As a general rule, never perform deployment manually! Always use an automated tool. If you do use a manual tool, one of the most frequently used is Publish, built in to Visual Studio, but it s convenience has some traps to be aware of. DXC Service allows you to create configuration transformation files. These include a name as part of the file extension, for example, Web.Release.config. The problem is that Publish refuses to deploy these files! Even if you explicitly include the file in a project using the GUI, Publish has been hard-coded to explicitly exclude them! This means that if you have created a Web.Integration.config it will not be deployed with Publish. You can get around this problem by manually editing the.csproj file to break the dependency on Web.config so Publish treats the configuration transformation files like any other content file. 22 Copyright AB 11

12 Module B Deploying to DXC Service Continuous Integration Build and deployment tools Visual Studio Publish, Problem 2 A second problem with Publish, is that it has an option to Remove additional files at destination. Normally this is good practice because it means there won t be any files left over from previous deployments that interfere with the new deployment. But DXC Service Integration environment has some files that we deploy for you to support some features like monitoring. If those files are deleted, then DXC Service breaks, and you will have to raise a support ticket for us to redeploy those special files! BAD! 23 Introduction Developing for DXC Service Configuration transformations for providers The following is a typical partial Web.Integration.config transformation file: <episerver.framework> <blob defaultprovider="azureblobs" xdt:transform="insert"> <providers> <add name="azureblobs" container="dxcalloy-assets" type="episerver.azure.blobs.azureblobprovider,episerver.azure" connectionstringname="episerverazureblobs" /> </providers> </blob> <event defaultprovider="azureevents" xdt:transform="insert"> <providers> <add name="azureevents" topic="dxcalloyevents" type="episerver.azure.events.azureeventprovider,episerver.azure" connectionstringname="episerverazureevents" /> </providers> </event> 24 Copyright AB 12

13 Introduction Developing for DXC Service Configuration transformations for connection strings In the <connectionstrings> section, you will want to change the database connection to use SQL database instead of LocalDb: <connectionstrings> <add name="episerverdb" connectionstring="{...}" xdt:transform="setattributes" xdt:locator="match(name)"/> In the <connectionstrings> section you could also define additional entries for blobs and events, but during the Module B exercises you will instead define the connection strings in the Application settings for the App Service in Azure Portal, which is how DXC Service does it. 25 Module G Optimizing, Securing, and Deploying Optimizing Caching Caching static application files and cache busting For performance reasons, it s a good idea to cache static application files for about a year. Find the Web.config s <system.webserver> element. Then modify the <clientcache> element to increase the max age from one day to one year, as shown: <staticcontent> <clientcache cachecontrolmode="usemaxage" cachecontrolmaxage="365.00:00:00" /> But what happens when you want to change the contents of a static file that does not include a version number or date in its name, like site.css? We need to bust the cached version. You can write some code that adds a fingerprint to each file automatically. This blog article shows an example of how: 26 Copyright AB 13

14 Module G Optimizing, Securing, and Deploying Optimizing Caching Caching content asset files For performance reasons, it s a good idea to cache content asset files for about a year. Add the following in Web.config s <configsections> element: <section name="staticfile" allowlocation="true" type= "EPiServer.Framework.Configuration.StaticFileSection, EPiServer.Framework" /> Then add the following element after the end of the </configsections> element: <staticfile expirationtime="365.00:00:00" /> You can also set cachecontrol and enableoutputcache: <staticfile expirationtime="365.00:00:00" cachecontrol="private" enableoutputcache="true" /> cachecontrol defaults to auto, which uses Private for authenticated visitors and Public for anonymous. 27 Copyright AB 14