This website has had quite the journey, moving through different domain names, frameworks, and applications over the years. It all started with static HTML and table-based layouts, then Community Server, Sitecore, and finally BlogEngine.net, where it’s been parked for over a decade. I haven't blogged at all since moving on from Hedgehog/Sitecore, but it's high time I get back to it.

This is my second post in the series around Sitecore module development as well as a follow up post to Sitecore needs a NuGet feed for their assemblies.

I maintain a fairly well used "Field Fallback Module", which was released in June 2012. The code for this module is available on GitHub and it has been setup with a very simple build process that has remain unchanged since day one. The module isn't under heavy development, but there have been a couple bugs reported lately. I took this opportunity to revisit the build and deploy process and see if we couldn't modernize it a bit.

In the Sitecore Slack Team's #TDS channel there was a Team Development for Sitecore feature request from Robbert Hock. It was:

This is a call to action for Sitecore to start hosting a NuGet feed of all common Sitecore assemblies. However, lets take a look at how the Sitecore development process has changed over the years.

A very common feature request we get for Team Development for Sitecore at Hedgehog is that people want code generation to create a file per Sitecore template in their project. Currently, when TDS code generation runs it will create a single file with all of the code inside of it. Using partial classes it enabled developers to extend the class with their needs, in a separate file, all the while keeping the code generated part in a file that can be overwritten and updated at any time by TDS. This is very much like the way Linq-to-SQL works.

From time to time we get feature requests for Team Development for Sitecore to support multiple sub-items with the same name as shown below.

Dan Galvez and I had come up with an idea for a, sort of, Twitter based Sitecore Scrum. In essence, people would post on Twitter what they are doing today with the hashtag #SitecoreScrum. Interestingly, another Sitecore developer (Mike Reynolds) started this exact same thing the very next day with this tweet. I've reached out to Mike and we are going to try and keep up with a daily #SitecoreScrum at 10am Eastern time. I don't know what will come of this, but it can't hurt knowing what others in our realm are doing with Sitecore.

When using Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) you may need to tell your source control system how to handle certain files. This post is mainly targeted to folks using Git as their source control system, but it could be a general guideline for people using any source control system that isn't integrated with Visual Studio.