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.
Disclaimer: This post was in a draft state for many, many, months. It was started and subsequently turned into my Sitecore Symposium 2012 talk. Now that SitecoreSym is over I am making this post and the associated code available.
Did you know that you can access special properties of a Sitecore item the same way you get a typical field's value?
When trying to determine if a Sitecore field has a value there are two basic ways.
Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["fieldName"].HasValue
or
Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["fieldName"].Value != ""
There are many ways to get the value of a Sitecore field and each is slightly different.
I had discovered a little bug revolving around the Sitecore.Data.Fields.Field.ContainsStandardValue property in Sitecore (at least 6.4.1.101221 through current). You cannot trust the value returned by Field.ContainsStandardValue if you have made any of the following calls: