As a Sitecore developer who is a fan of leveraging Lucene in my projects I've always been aggravated that, starting with Sitecore 6, I couldn't use Luke to view my indexes. As Jens Mikkelsen points out this was due to custom compression that Sitecore uses for the Lucene index.
For one of my the latest projects the content editors were always trying to get the actual URL to a Sitecore media library item, but there is no easy way to see this in Sitecore. As developers we know it is in the form of //media/[ShortID].ashx or //media/[Path].ashx, but editors don't want to think about that. They just want it figured out and displayed in front of them.
This is more of a 'note to self' type post, but I am sure some may find it helpful...
This post if mainly in response to a question that was asked, and subsequent tweet, during my session at Dreamcore 2010.
Disclaimer: While some of these guidelines may be applied to other Content Management Systems, or .net web forms in general, this is based on my experience with Sitecore.
I've recently been doing some work with the Web Forms for Marketers (2.0) module and I must say I was presently surprised! The first version of this module was a rather good first pass, but it typically came up short when we wanted to use it. Version 2 is a big step forward and we are just about to launch a site using it. While it is a great package, and I recommend everyone check it out, it does have some "gotchas."
Sitecore's Webforms for Marketers (v2) module is pretty impressive out of the gate. There was an issue, however, with a recent project that had a few different languages. We needed a Droplist in the form that showed a list of items from Sitecore and while the module does this out of the box it has a gotcha to it; it won't remove items from the drop list that do not have a version in the context language.
404's in Sitecore can be very simple or extremely complicated with site independent designs and functionality. While a blog post on the later would be a worthwhile blog post, this post will cover a very simple example of how to set the StatusCode of any page in your Sitecore installation.
In my last post I wrote what I planned on building for my home developer rig.
In honor of Windows 7, and my increasing frustration with my 4 year old DELL computer, I figured I would pony up and build myself a nice developer rig. Even though it is my home computer my typical usage is work related; Visual Studio(s), SQL Server, IIS, Virtual Machines, etc... My wife's typical usage is email and web browsing. We are not gamers at all; not even solitaire! The most graphic intense application I use would be Google Earth.