Why you should upgrade to the latest version

I made no secret that I’m a die-hard advocate for upgrading to latest EPiServer CMS/Commerce version. There are several reasons for that, mostly from new shiny features that your businesses dearly need, new big performance improvements that your customers firmly demand.

But there is another, not so obvious reason: support.

Let me tell you a story.

This morning we received a support case from support team. A customer recently upgraded from Commerce 7.5 (Eww) to 11.7 (Yay!), things went well except they had a small problem with data displaying in Catalog UI. Some of the properties were not properly displayed, but they are still showing correct in Commerce Manager.

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World forums support vote up/down now, and what does that mean for you

I really wanted to post this in the official blog, however we don’t have a “World” blog, and this does not really fit into “Commerce blog” which we (Commerce development team) usually use for official announcements, so I have to use my personal blog instead.

If you haven’t noticed, then you can now vote up, or down a post in World forum. Thanks to the hard work of my colleagues in World development team, that feature went on live today! (Of which I’m very excited)

If you have been using StackOverflow (as as developer, you likely have), then you know the meaning of voting up and down. The idea is the same here, there are differences in the detail implementations, such as the amount of points given (or taken) from a vote up (down), but basically:

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ServiceAPI + Postman, a match in heaven

No, it’s just a note-to-self.

A lot of customers have been using ServiceAPI, and to great successes. We also have very good documentation here – of which largely thanks to my colleague Mark Hall. But what if you want to play around with ServiceAPI and don’t want to write app/build/run it yourself? The answer is simple: There are many REST Clients can do the job for you, and Postman is usually regarded as the best/most popular one.

But, the documentation are for C# client, it can be quite confusing to use Postman to work with ServiceAPI for the first time (or times). If you are experienced with Postman, great! But if you are not – like me – when you use Postman from time to time and everytime it’s new, then this post can be useful to you. Today I need to do some tests with ServiceAPI, and I had to spend some time figuring out how to use Postman – so I decided it’s better to have all of those noted for future reference.

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Choose your battles

This is the third part of the series: How to survive and thrive – a series for new developers to become better at their jobs. You can read the first two parts here and here.

In military, there is a term of “uphill battle”. That when you have to fight your way up a hill, when you enemy controls the top. It’s a very difficult fight and your chance of success is low. Any experienced military leader knows uphill battles are something you should avoid until there are no other options.

That also applies with any jobs. Including programming.

The truth is, you shouldn’t fight the battles you can’t win.
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Mass update catalog entries

This is something you don’t do daily, but you will probably need one day, so it might come in handy.

Recently we got a question on how to update the code of all entries in the catalog. This is interesting, because even thought you don’t update the codes that often (if at all, as the code is the identity to identify the entries with external system, such as ERPs or PIMs), it raises a question on how to do mass update on catalog entries.

- Update the code directly via database query. It is supposedly the fastest to do such thing. If you have been following my posts closely, you must be familiar with my note regarding how Episerver does not disclose the database schema. I list it here because it’s an option, but not the good one. It easily goes wrong (and cause catastrophes), you have to deal with versions and cache, and those can be hairy to get right. Direct data manipulation should be only used as the last resort when no other option is available.

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