Category: Blogging

Speed up your catalog entries indexing

Even with the raising popularity of FindCommerce, I suspect that many Commerce customers are still using the search provider system, as it comes with an undeniable benefit: It can be used within Commerce Manager. And while I suspect a majority of you have the eventual indexing turned on (aka the entry will be indexed as soon as it’s changed), many still index the entries on demand. Aka manually, or periodically via scheduled job.

We received a report from a customer recently as the indexing timeout, as he was indexing a large amount of entries (about 250.000 entries on 8 catalogs). When we looked into the problem, we discover a possible improvement which is almost free for you.

Continue reading “Speed up your catalog entries indexing” →

Catalog Search APIs are for editing only!

If you are using Catalog Search APIs for any customer-facing features, you are doing it wrong!

I have seen this problem a couple of times – the search feature on the site is “dead” – it is very slow, and the log file is usually filled with dead lock or timeout error. As it turns out, the search feature was implemented by Catalog Search APIs, which is a big no-no.

To be clear, there are two builtin APIs related to searching in Episerver Commerce: the “fast” one, which can be done via SearchManager, ISearchCriteria and ISearchResults, is the SearchProvider APIs. It’s the indexed search (strictly speaking, you can make it not “indexed”, but that’s beside the point), and the actual search functions will be provided by providers, like LuceneSearchProvider, Solr35SearchProvider, or FindSearchProvider.

Continue reading “Catalog Search APIs are for editing only!” →

Why don’t I reply to your recruitment emails?

This post is about a (I hope) small portion of recruiters. If you have never sent an email like this, congratulations, I think you can consider yourself as a professional recruiter. If you did, might be you can changed the way you communicate with candidates to be more effective? I don’t want to burn any bridge here – I have high respects for recruiters, who are working hard to connect companies with potential employees, making the world a better place.

Most of the recruiters I’ve had chances to work with are great specialists and it’s been a pleasure working with them, even that I have to turn down all of the offers because I don’t want to change jobs now (While I’m not seeking for new job at the moment – have I ever mentioned that I have a great team at Episerver? – I think it’s not harmful to build up a network, just in case). However, there were times I feel annoyed when I receive a recruitment email. Initially, I would kindly reply to that email, saying I’m not interested in the positions. Later, I simply delete those emails. And I even marked some as spams.

It should not have to come to that end.

Why?

Continue reading “Why don’t I reply to your recruitment emails?” →

How to be a C# developer

C# has never been considered as a cool language (fact: It was initially called COOL – C-like Object Oriented Language) – it’s a good language, very good indeed, but because of it is “created by Microsoft” and then “tied to .NET platform”, it lost the coolness to other languages – JavaScript, C, Scala, you name it.

The table has turned and the wind has changed. Microsoft has been making bold moves with all the open source projects that run multi platforms. Once known as the “evil” of software industry, Microsoft is changing their image to be good again. And with Xamarin being free – C# is the language to learn now – if you have not already. Being a very good OOP language with powerful functional programming features, and built on a mature platform and excellent tools and library, you can use C# for almost everything these days – mobile, desktop, server, and even client.

So how?

Visual Studio Community:

Visual Studio is simply one of the best IDEs out there, and while missing some of the features, Visual Studio Community is free – so it’s perfect choice if you are a student or simply learning the language. It can be downloaded from here:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx

Continue reading “How to be a C# developer” →

Big and beautiful: A quick Phillips BDM3270QP review

My screen finally arrived and I’ve spent a couple of days playing with it. It is the screen I wanted, and I tried to search about it quite a lot, but the English content about it is quite limited, so I decide to write one here, in case you’re looking for some reviews before buying it.

Why BDM3270QP?

In the specs, this screen is completely a steal. 32 inches, QHD (2560×1440) resolution, AMVA native 10-bit panel (without RFC, so 1.07 billion of true colors), stand which supports titling, pivoting etc,… And it’s only 4390 SEK here (equivalent to 534 USD, but hey, I am in Sweden, where everything is crazily expensive, remember?), which is even cheaper than many other 27″ QHD screens. I have a habit (not sure good or bad) of checking everything before buying, and this is the list I come up with:

Plus:

+ Big size. 32″ 2560×1440 is just right, considering the distance between my eyes and the screen. 27″ QHD is a bit small, while 32″ 4k is a bit too much pixels (which makes thing smaller than I’d like). And 4k non-TN panel screens are much more expensive currently.
+ AMVA. It’s not TN! It might not be as good as IPS in term of color reproduction and viewing angles, but it’s 10 bit panel (of course that requires extra parts like the connection, the machine to make it works) so it should be comparable on some level. And VA, in general, is better than IPS in terms of contrast (black level) and not-glowing.
+ Rich in port and connection. I have anything I’d like to and more: DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, USB (2×3.0 and 2×2.0).

Continue reading “Big and beautiful: A quick Phillips BDM3270QP review” →

Lessons learned from running a blog

Expect yourself to do many things, if not everything. You’ll be an administrator, a developer and a writer, all at the same time. This blog is the first time I install WordPress, first time I install and configure Apache, first time I configure CNAME or so, first time I use Google Adsense. It was not smooth all the way, but it’s not that hard and it’s really rewarding when I got it works. One after one. I failed sometimes, like when I tried to make WordPress runs on PHP7 (I’m not a PHP developer after, so I run away when the problem gets out of hand), but for most parts, I can find an answer from here and there on the Internet. Thank you, internet.

Attracting visitors is hard. Internet is full of things and no matter how you try, there are always other content somewhere more interesting than yours. Except if you are exceptional good at writing, or you are famous person, most of the people will not visit your website. Not even one. And sadly enough, many of your visitors will not return, even if your website was helpful to them. You helped them to solve a problem and that’s it. Attracting visitors is already hard enough, and keeping them coming back is even harder.

Continue reading “Lessons learned from running a blog” →