Is PlayStation 4 Pro a worthy upgrade?

PlayStation 4 Pro was a first “mid-gen” upgrade in a very long time. It is an incremental update to the original PS4, keeping the promise of backward compatibility, at the cost of limited power jump. Is it a worthy upgrade?

I got my original PS4 3 years go and that was a massive jump from my previous Xbox 360 (of course that is expected, it’s a different generation). Builtin hard drive, builtin WiFi N, builtin gigabit LAN, builtin Blu-ray drive, the list goes on and on. Needless to say, I have been very happy with my PS4.

When Pro came out, I was a little disappointed. No UHD Blu-ray. Unable to handle native 4K on most games. Old games were not getting a patch. HDR comes to original PS4 as well. Etc. I was not excited to buy one, unless my PS4 fails.

Well, my PS4 did not fail, but my colleague sold his fairly new PS4 Pro at 1/2 new price, and I decided to take the chance. At that price it’s great value, and even if I don’t like it, I can still sell it and even make a profit! Of course there was no “Wow” moments as I had with my old PS4.

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Fixing HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error

When you are trying to setup an IIS website on your local machine/new server, it’s very likely that you are going to get this error

HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error

The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Detailed Error Information:

Module	IIS Web Core
Notification	Unknown
Handler	Not yet determined
Error Code	0x8007000d
Config Error
Config File	\\?\C:\EL\EL\CMS\web.config

Requested URL	http://el:80/
Physical Path
Logon Method	Not yet determined
Logon User	Not yet determined

Config Source:

   -1: 
    0:

More Information:

This error occurs when there is a problem reading the configuration file for the Web server or Web application. In some cases, the event logs may contain more information about what caused this error.View more information »

IIS could have had a better message of what is wrong, but we will have to live with this right now. Here’s the check lists you can go through:

Missing IIS features

Your IIS installation might be missing some critical features that are required to run the website (in this case, to parse the web.config). Make sure your IIS instance has all these features installed:

Missing IIS UrlRewrite module

The website might have URL Rewrite rules and your IIS does not have that installed. Simply go here https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite, download and install it.

Package equivalent promotion type in Episerver Commerce

Recently we got this question on how to create package-equivalent promotion type in Episerver Commerce, from https://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2018/2/is-there-a-built-in-group-discount/

I already recommended to use package for such purpose, because of several reasons:

Package is a builtin feature, and is fully supported by the framework, both on UI level and API level.
It has been well tested and is very reliable to use.

However in a real world implementation, it might not be easy to just add package implementation. One reason would be if you rely on an external PIM to handle your catalog. Configuring it to support package can not be trivial.

So why not try to implement a package equivalent promotion in the promotion engine, to see if it works.

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Useful T-SQL snippets for development and troubleshooting

This post is more of a note-to-self. These are the useful T-SQL statements which can be incredibly useful in development and troubleshooting

SET STATISTICS IO ON

Turn on the IO statistics for statements run after that until set to OFF explicitly. We then switch to Messages tab to see how many IO operations were done on each table.

SET STATISTICS TIME ON

Find out about the statements were executed: which statements, its texts, how many reads (logical), how many time was spent on CPU and how many time was spent total

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Speed up your Catalog incremental indexing

As your products are being constantly updated, you would naturally want them to be properly (and timely) indexed – as that’s crucial to have the search results that would influence your customers into buying stuffs. For example, if you just drop the prices of your products , you would want those products to appear in new price segment as soon as possible.

This should be very easy with Find.Commerce – so if you are using Find (which you should) – stop reading, nothing for you here. Things, however, can be more complicated if you are using the more “traditional” SearchProvider.

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Fixing Cannot find module ‘sync-exec’ error with yarn install

Error message:

clientResources\node_modules\uglifyjs-webpack-plugin: Command failed. Cannot find module ‘sync-exec’

Reason:

uglifyjs-webpack-plugin 0.4.6 defines this command

“postinstall”: “node lib/post_install.js”

which looks like this

var execSync = require('child_process').execSync;
var fs = require('fs');

// Node 0.10 check
if (!execSync) {
execSync = require('sync-exec');
}

So if your node instance is older than 0.10, it will fallback to require sync-exec . Unlike execSync which is a builtin module, sync-exec is, or was an old module that you have to install explicitly. If your node instance does not have that installed, boom!

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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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