Category: Sitecore 9XP

SSL binding in Azure App Service

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

In part one we discussed how we can add custom domain in Sitecore App Service. Today we will go through how we can secure this custom domain with SSL bindings, so without doing any further delay below are the points to add SSL bindings.

Secure a custom domain

Do the following steps:

In the Azure portal, from the left menu, select App Services > <app-name>.

From the left navigation of your app, start the TLS/SSL Binding dialog by:

  • Selecting Custom domains > Add binding
  • Selecting TLS/SSL settings > Add TLS/SSL binding

Add binding to domain

In Custom Domain, select the custom domain you want to add a binding for.

If your app already has a certificate for the selected custom domain, go to Create binding directly. Otherwise, keep going.

Add a certificate for custom domain

If your app has no certificate for the selected custom domain, then you have two options:

 Note

You can also Create a free certificate (Preview) or Import a Key Vault certificate, but you must do it separately and then return to the TLS/SSL Binding dialog.

Create binding

Use the following table to help you configure the SSL binding in the TLS/SSL Binding dialog, then click Add Binding.

Setting Description
Custom domain The domain name to add the SSL binding for.
Private Certificate Thumbprint The certificate to bind.
TLS/SSL Type
  • SNI SSL – Multiple SNI SSL bindings may be added. This option allows multiple SSL certificates to secure multiple domains on the same IP address. Most modern browsers (including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera) support SNI (for more information, see Server Name Indication).
  • IP SSL – Only one IP SSL binding may be added. This option allows only one SSL certificate to secure a dedicated public IP address. After you configure the binding, follow the steps in Remap A record for IP SSL.
    IP SSL is supported only in Production or Isolated tiers.

Once the operation is complete, the custom domain’s SSL state is changed to Secure.

SSL binding successful

 Note

A Secure state in the Custom domains means that it is secured with a certificate, but App Service doesn’t check if the certificate is self-signed or expired, for example, which can also cause browsers to show an error or warning.

Remap A record for IP SSL

If you don’t use IP SSL in your app, skip to Test HTTPS for your custom domain.

By default, your app uses a shared public IP address. When you bind a certificate with IP SSL, App Service creates a new, dedicated IP address for your app.

If you mapped an A record to your app, update your domain registry with this new, dedicated IP address.

Your app’s Custom domain page is updated with the new, dedicated IP address. Copy this IP address, then remap the A record to this new IP address.

Test HTTPS

In various browsers, browse to https://<your.custom.domain> to verify that it serves up your app.

Portal navigation to Azure app

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Performance tuning of Sitecore SPEAK components

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to explain you how you can reduce the time taken for loading by SPEAK components in your Sitecore application.

In order to reduce load time of SPEAK components after website modification, you can alter the compilation element in the web.config by adding the optimizeCompilations attribute to it as follows:

<compilation ...  optimizeCompilations="true">

Actual Implementation in web.config file looks like:

c

Adding this attribute will make ASP.NET re-compile only the files that were explicitly changed and leave all the other files intact.

Please note that if optimizeCompilations is true, you might encounter some issues during development after re-compilation. According to the MSDN article

When you change a top-level file only the affected files are recompiled. This saves time but can cause run-time errors depending on the type of changes you make to a top-level file.

Please check the Optimizing Dynamic Compilation part of the a aforementioned article for more details.

Happy Learning Sitecore !!!!

Excessive usages of threads on session expiration processing in Sitecore

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ 3 Comments

Hi Champs,

Today I am sharing a case study for Excessive usages of threads on session expiration processing in Sitecore 9.2 XP and Sitecore 9.2 XC deployments.

Root cause for the issue:

Due to an issue in Session State providers during high load situations, Sitecore instance may end up in a thread starvation issue which can cause the website to become unresponsive.

Solution to the issue:

Sitecore has provided  SC Hotfix 367157-1.zip hotfix which is recommended to apply to all Sitecore 9.2 XP and Sitecore 9.2 XC deployments.

The patch should be installed on CD instances (or on servers that are dedicated for handling session expiration, if those are a part of a custom setup).

Happy Learning

Check out your CD Solr indexing in Sitecore Azure PaaS Scaled Environment

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to talk on miss-configuration which sometime comes in CD role for Indexing strategy.

There was a scenario which recently I came across that from CD role in Azure PaaS Scaled environment Indexing was getting triggered which is wrong as indexing has to be triggered from CM role ideally. So below are the details of entire case study.

Cloud Environment: Sitecore Managed Cloud (XP-Small and XP-Medium)

Cause of the issue: By default indexing strategy was set to “onPublishEndAsyncSingleInstance” in CD role.

After investigating 10 days with Sitecore support and Product services team we found that indexing strategy was set to “onPublishEndAsyncSingleInstance” which was causing excessive DTU usage. This was set for below.

  1. sitecore_web_index
  2. sitecore_fxm_web_index
  3. sitecore_marketing_asset_index_web
  4. sitecore_marketingdefinitions_web

Solution: I created a patch file for setting indexing strategy to Manual for all above from CD role. As all these are getting rebuild properly from CM role.

Patch file: Patch file has below configurations. Note this has to be added only on CD role.

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <contentSearch>
      <configuration>
        <indexes>
          <index id="sitecore_web_index">
            <strategies>
              <strategy>
                <patch:delete />
              </strategy>
              <strategy ref="contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/manual" />
            </strategies>
          </index>
          <index id="sitecore_fxm_web_index">
            <strategies>
              <strategy>
                <patch:delete />
              </strategy>
              <strategy ref="contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/manual" />
            </strategies>
          </index>
          <index id="sitecore_marketing_asset_index_web">
            <strategies>
              <strategy>
                <patch:delete />
              </strategy>
              <strategy ref="contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/manual" />
            </strategies>
          </index>
          <index id="sitecore_marketingdefinitions_web">
            <strategies>
              <strategy>
                <patch:delete />
              </strategy>
              <strategy ref="contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/manual" />
            </strategies>
          </index>
        </indexes>
      </configuration>
    </contentSearch>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Happy Indexing

MVC Pre-compiled views in Sitecore 9XP for Azure PaaS

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to explain quick learn for usage of Pre-complied view in Sitecore 9XP. Enabling Pre-compiled MVC views gives boost to performance in Azure PaaS environment, it is considered as one of the performance tuning parameter in  Sitecore Azure PaaS environment and Sitecore Managed Cloud.

By pre-compiling views you will benefit from the following:

  • Compile time checking of errors. Usually, Razor files are compiled when they are first required. By pre-compiling your Razor views you remove the source of runtime bugs.
  • Faster load time. The SitecoreRazorViewEngine will start to load your views from an assembly (.dll file) rather than a view (.cshtml file).
  • Once the Razor-Generator is Configured for your Visual Studio Solution you can follow below steps
  • To enable Razor-Generator Check this link.

Perform the following to pre-compile MVC views:

  1. Go to the below folder path. wwwroot\youewebsitefolder\App_Config\Sitecore\Mvc
  2. Here you will find the config file with the name “Sitecore.Mvc.config”
  3. In this file search for term “<precompilation>”.
  4. And under <precompilation> node add below configuration highlighted in green. don’t forget to change the name to your assembly name.                                                                                                       <precompilation>
        <assemblies>
            <assemblyIdentity name=”Sitecore.Mvc” />
            <assemblyIdentity name=”YourAssemblyName” />
        </assemblies>
    </precompilation>

Happy Learning Sitecore !!!!

New/Existing Domain as Custom Domain in Sitecore Managed Cloud

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

As a part of Sitecore Managed Cloud series this one is last article about adding New or Existing domain to SMC app services.

So let’s start directly on article which tells us, how you can migrate the New/existing domain to your SMC Azure App Service as Custom domain.

Enable the CNAME record mapping in Azure

In the left navigation of the app page in the Azure portal, select Custom domains.

Custom domain menu

In the Custom domains page of the app, add the fully qualified custom DNS name (www.contoso.com) to the list.

Select the + icon next to Add custom domain.

Add host name

Type the fully qualified domain name that you added a CNAME record for, such as www.contoso.com.

Select Validate.

The Add custom domain page is shown.

Make sure that Hostname record type is set to CNAME (www.example.com or any subdomain).

Select Add custom domain.

Add DNS name to the app

It might take some time for the new custom domain to be reflected in the app’s Custom domains page. Try refreshing the browser to update the data.

CNAME record added

Note:

After you added custom domain don’t forget to add this domain entry in to sites configurations in SiteDefinition.config or Sitecore.config files.

Happy Learning!!!!

Globalization Setting Sitecore PaaS and SMC

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to give you quick quick learning details about how you can setup default Culture of your Sitecore Application.

First question which will get raised why you want set  this?(specifically in Azure PaaS and Sitecore Managed Cloud)

Answer to this question is now a days we host Sitecore application in Azure PaaS or any Other Cloud offerings where the actual Timezone and Culture is different. In this case the impacts will come to few part off your application where your using default culture settings in application globalization. Which means miss match of time/date formats etc.

Next question will be How we can fix it ?

So the answer is as below.

  1. Go to your Sitecore application.
  2. Open Web.config.
  3. Serch for below term.                                                                                          “<globalization”
  4. You will find a predefined setting with few attributes but you can set few more attributes like below to set default Culture of your application.
<globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" enableClientBasedCulture="false" culture="en-GB" uiCulture="en-GB" />

Note:

  1. This setting is totally different than the Time Zone setting for Sitecore application.
  2. What I mean over here is even if you set Time Zone to the one which you want in Cloud still you will get issues with formats.
  3. So this settings will help all those issues in Sitecore.
  4. This settings is tested of in Azure PaaS and Sitecore Managed Cloud.

Happy Learning

My Sitecore 2019 Contributions

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ 1 Comment

Hi Champs,

I am writing this blog to share what I have done in year 2019, not only in Sitecore but in other tech communities also.

Year 2019 has been a very experimental year for me as at the start of the year I was working in Organization for Sitecore one of the huge/large scale Sitecore implementation. I was working as Sitecore SME/Architect there. As I was Client to Sitecore, I got a chance to speak with some great tech brain in Sitecore.

Suddenly one I got a call that you got selected and, I got a chance to move to Auckland thanks to my current Organization for this. After moving in New Zealand again I started to play with Sitecore and this time Sitecore with Azure PaaS.

Now coming back to what I have done so for Sitecore and other technologies.

Working with Sitecore:

I will take this as questions and try to answer.

How you are contributing to Sitecore from online platforms?

Answer to this question would be simple and that is– I have Modules in Sitecore Marketplace, I write a blogs, I have few Open projects in Git, I am active member of Sitecore StackExchange etc. So I will quickly give a summary via points to all this contributions as below.

  • Sitecore Market Place:

The main medium for sharing the new customized things for Sitecore is Sitecore Marketplace. I have below Modules Published in Market Place.

  1. Social Side Menu: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/S/Social_Media_Side_Menu_Module.aspx
  2. Sitecore NFR: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/S/Sitecore_NFR_Module.aspx
  3. Sitecore IoT: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/S/Sitecore_IoT_ModuleArduino.aspx
  4. Sitecore Fake SMTP: (Documentation for this module is in progress)    https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/SitecoreFakeSMTPModule10.aspx
  • Blog:

The main medium for sharing knowledge is via blogs, I try to share my knowledge and different achievements over here in blogs so that those who are finding answers to those question they can get it easily.

  • Git:

https://github.com/NKulkarni92

I have repo where I have code for all the above modules and I also have few Open projects for Sitecore in Android which I am currently working on.

  • Sitecore StackExchange:

The other main medium for sharing knowledge is via Stackexchange, I try to share solution which is good fit for the questions which we get in the exchange I also try to follow best practice within Solution if it is related to code or configuration.

stack

  • LinkedIn:

I have almost near to 2K connection here with different technology, I try to answer the questions which are asked here in LinkedIn for Sitecore also. But I mainly getting questions on chatbox here where I answer privately.  I also share knowledge at one of the groups created by Chris Williams for Sitecore DAM. I discussed how IoT helps to build the DAM in new era.

For this year, I’ve been working on different projects related to Sitecore. But each project complexity differs. So, with the different projects, I’ve been able to acquire experience but also to use new Sitecore features.

How you are contributing to Sitecore from offline platforms?

My offline activities haven’t changed. I keep on learning new ways, best practices on Sitecore. I am going to perform 1 presentation about the Sitecore Managed Cloud On-Boarding in SUG Auckland on 5th December 2019. I also help beginners in the team to learn Sitecore. As a part of CoE team I also help different teams to train then and setting up the environments for them according to their client’s needs. I am also involved in sales of products technically where I do tech pre-sales PoC for different Sitecore offerings. I also do freelance or volunteer consulting with different offline clients.

What is you experience with different new features of Sitecore?

I have little different experience with new Sitecore features like JSS, SXA,  new Sitecore Managed Cloud, Sitecore on Azure PaaS, as I said different then I will explain one example here is like JSS.

I worked on hacking JSS in Sitecore 8.2 version  and then we migrated the entire Site to Sitecore 9.2 for one of my client.

One more different experience is fine tuning website migrated from AWS IaaS to Sitecore Managed Cloud. But to explain few of my project related to these experiments I made point wise details as below.

SXA

This is the basic development whereby we had to get content architecture which will help to accommodate 1500+ SXA Multisites to the major global rollout.

Difficulty level: Extreme – Need to know how Sitecore works internally.

JSS

I created a dummy project in JSS just to get the idea of how it works internally. This was the reverse engineering which I have done actually to get one of my Sitecore 8.2 website upgraded to Sitecore 9.1.1 JSS website. In actual implementation we went with disconnected architecture to get everything resolved and now the Site is live. We used Native JSS as OOTB and React for the JSS app.

Sitecore Managed Cloud

This was one of the complex projects where I worked on migrating Sitecore site from AWS to Sitecore Managed Cloud offering. This is the first Sitecore Managed Cloud Project in New Zealand. The client is very happy with what we have achieved as the load time for Site is less than 2sec which is amazing. Working with the Managed Cloud team is great experience.

Other projects

I have also been involved in projects where we have used the Sitecore PaaS, work on presales for the client to get then on Sitecore 9.2 SXA with Sitecore Managed Cloud and Sitecore Commerce. Also working on different ongoing projects to get new features developed for them.

All the projects I’ve been involved in, I have tried to share my experience via blog posts or by performing presentations.

What are your future Objectives?

I will try to answer this in bullets as below.

  1. I will try to contribute more to all Sitecore community mediums.
  2. I am already in process of me next Sitecore Module.
  3. I am in panning phase of mobile based app for Sitecore which I will try to complete in coming year.
  4. Rather than just promoting Sitecore I am trying to sell new feature of Sitecore so that implementations of website will be more code less and Client will get full authority on what they want to do in Sitecore.
  5. Be a part of technical presales.
  6. I am trying to get Sitecore more into AI and IoT space for which I will be working throughout next year.
  7. I will be sharing the new learning and innovative things via my blogs to community.
  8. Keep learning Sitecore

Now this is a small contribution to Sitecore but I have few different things in my buckets as below.

Working with Azure DevOps/PaaS.

I finally managed to work with Azure this year as I was working only in premise VM’s, I badly wanted to work with Cloud and year 2019 given me this opportunity.

I learnt most of the  things like deploying .net web applications in Azure PaaS, creating and managing ARM template in Azure, Resource creation and managements, up scaling and down scaling in Azure, Performance tuning in Azure PaaS.

I also played around to create few Azure DevOps pipelines this years with total automation in workflow manner to push everything from source control system to running environments.

I decided to share what I got in Azure via my blogs and I already shared few and few are in pipelines to get published.

Working with Arduino

Yeh year 2019 asked me to go back and get this again in plate to eat. yes Arduino one of the best IoT platform to code and automate the things with IoT devices. In year 2014 I was playing around with Arduino on extensive level to get one of my university level project completed, but year 2019 asked me to play around with this to follow my passion about all these electronic/robotic kits. I started writing codes to Arduino AWS community IDE which is basically closed group for Arduino programmer where you can write code for Arduino and share within community and help them. I have 4 different sketch in Arduino right now and working on few more.

Happy Sharing,  Happy Learning

Higher thread usage in Sitecore Azure PaaS

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to explain one of the major factor which can contribute to issue of Performance to your Sitecore Application in Azure PaaS, which is excessive thread calls. Below are point wise explanation of entire case study with solution.

The actual trigger for Higher thread Usage: 

Calling an async code in a synchronous execution path leads to the calling thread being paused until the async part finishes (the corresponding Task object is marked as completed). Because of the specific implementation of async methods in C#, the Task object cannot be marked as complete until continuations are executed. In most of the scenarios, continuations are scheduled to be executed on thread pool threads. Therefore, the calling thread starts to depend on the availability of worker threads in the default thread pool.

One more contributor xConnect:

Sitecore xConnect is written according to high-performance application best practices, with optimized thread consumption. Its design allows for taking full advantage of async operation processing and it defines the custom scheduler to tackle excessive thread consumption.

So now you will be wondering that in regular development path we have both the above case will come, then why this issue started coming from Sitecore 9XP onward.

Simple answer(Root Cause of the issue):

Unfortunately, the recent changes in .NET Framework 4.7.2 (System.Net.Http assembly) removed the respect of custom thread schedulers. This has led to excessive thread consumption by sync-async operations.

Solution:

It is possible to configure a Sitecore application to use a previous version of the System.Net.Http.dll assembly instead of the .NET Framework 4.7.2 version.

Copy the System.Net.Http.dll file from the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\[*]\Professional\MSBuild\ Microsoft\Microsoft.NET.Build.Extensions\net471\lib folder to the \bin folder of Sitecore. Assembly file version 4.6.26011.01.

      – where [*] should be replaced with relevant Visual Studio version (2017 or 2019).

Configure Sitecore to use the new assembly version instead of the assembly from GAC:

  1. Remove all existing binding redirects for System.Net.Http from the Web.config file.
  2. Add the following binding redirect to the Web.config file: 
    <dependentAssembly>
  <assemblyIdentity name="System.Net.Http" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" />
  <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.2.0.0" newVersion="4.2.0.0" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" />
</dependentAssembly>

When version 4.2.0.0 of System.Net.Http library is used, it contains an implementation of the HttpClient class that respects custom schedulers. Therefore, synchronous methods of xConnect client require just a single thread to complete a request.

Sitecore Fake SMTP Server Module

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to introduce a Sitecore Module especially to developers who can use this to capture Emails from their Sitecore implementation in Sitecore Tab itself for their Local machine.

So not losing more time I like to give a small pathway to use this module, which is as below.

Installation:

  1. You need to download the module from the below link.
    https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/S/SitecoreFakeSMTPModule10.aspx
  2. Install this module to your dev local machine environment.
  3. After installation, you will find one new folder created in your website folder as below.                                                                                        wwwroot\<your website folder>\FakeSmtp\website\
  4. You need to create a simple website for this by following below simple steps.
    • Create a new website in IIS with the name “fakesmtp”.
    • Point this website to the new folder created above.        fake(wwwroot\<your website folder>\FakeSmtp\website\)
    • Create a new binding for this website with “sitecore.fake.smtp” as below.bin
    • And the last step is to add new host entry for this like below. 127.0.0.1         sitecore.fake.smtp

How to use this module from Sitecore:

  1. After installing this module you need to login to Sitecore.
  2. Then you need to go to Developer Menu.
  3. In the developer’s menu, you will find the new tab called “Fake SMTP”
  4. This tab has a button called “Start Fake SMTP” click the button.

smf

  1. Now, this will open new tab which will have different menu but initial page has some instruction implementing the code in your Sitecore .NET project to get these email capture in this module.

        ffdsf

  1. I believe everyone most of the time uses the library (System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient) which is mentioned in instruction page.
  2. If yes then you can directly get to Messages tab where you can see next email captured when it gets triggered.
  3. If no then you just need to add/update few lines of code to get this working

Note:  Right now model doesn’t have close button which will come in next release.

Please leave comments/query/suggestions.

Happy innovating Sitecore.