Okay, to go with my LastLoginDate frustrations, I also noticed that when I opened up a User’s Information tab, it always showed the current date and time. Even when I know that user is not in use. E.g.:
This is a test user, and hasn’t been used in the last few days. So, what gives?
Continue reading “Sitecore LastActivityDate is updated by the act of trying to view it.”While demoing to a customer I noticed that the LastLoginDate for one of the test users I was using had an incorrect Last Login Date as shown in User Manager. E.g. This…
I knew this was wrong. But why? Well, for once I tried Copilot, and it returned the exciting news that the ‘Last Login’ does not update for user when logging in when using Owin.
Continue reading “Sitecore LastLoginDate not updated when using OWIN Auth”EDIT: I contacted Sitecore support about this one, and it turns out that it is fixed in Sitecore 10.4. (Number 91923 on https://developers.sitecore.com/downloads/Sitecore_Experience_Platform/104/Sitecore_Experience_Platform_104/Release_Notes). I missed that. Of course, there are still a lot of pre-10.4 instances out there, but over time this should cease being an issue)
Sitecore IDs – They’re just Guids, right? I mean, they look like a guid, their string representation is that of a Guid – so they must be Guids, right? Nope! It seems not. Get a load of this:
So here I’m trying to parse a SearchResult “topic”. It’s name is a Guid as a string, in “N” format.
What the hell is going on?
Continue reading “Sitecore’s ID parsing is crazy”I’ve noticed that Helix projects – while offering a lot – do seem to be slow to respond to the first request. Painfully slow. Like “Application Initialization is required” slow. I knew that this was due to view compilation at runtime (something that could be handled by compiling your views at, you know, compile time) – but I’d always wondered why it was so slow.
Well, I think I’ve found the answer – Hundreds of renderings? Your first-page-load could be sloooow by Chris Perks.
Continue reading “Why Sitecore is so slow at first request…”So, one of my colleagues contacted me with a simple question – why was Azure Front Door not caching his pages and images. Well, I think there were two different reasons; one for pages (discussed there) and one for images (discussed here).
This is a bit simpler than the problem with pages, but highlights that, if you’ve a problem and you dig through the <settings> section of Sitecore’s config, you’ll eventually come across some kind of setting that relates to your problem.
Continue reading “Understanding Sitecore’s Cache-Control for Media Items”So, one of my colleagues contacted me with a simple question – why was Azure Front Door not caching his pages and images. Well, I think there were two different reasons; one for pages (discussed here) and one for images (discussed there).
The short answer for pages was “Because the setting DisableBrowserCaching was set to true”. This appears to be a default for Sitecore (and is probably appropriate for Analytics and tracking reasons – though not all of our customers use analytics). I mean, the setting in ShowConfig.aspx is pretty well described.
But wait… what’s this mention of Pragma: no-cache?
Continue reading “Spurious Pragma Header in Sitecore Page Responses”I’ve posted previously about some Azure WAF rules that you might want to disable. Well, here’s some more:
Continue reading “More Azure WAF rules to disable”Kusto is great, but one problem is that, if you’re summarizing and creating a time chart, and some of those time bins don’t have any results, then rather than your graph’s line going to zero, it skips those times. This results in a weird graph. Consider this:
This graph never goes to zero – because the groups don’t exist if their value is zero. It can also lead to weird lines that “skip” to the next value. Eg. the peak at 0000h on Apr 4 – it’s joined to a point at about 0145h. The intermediate points are skipped.
This can be fixed.
Continue reading “Using Kusto to get a full time series”I had restored a SQL Azure database between instances, and the contained user used for connections didn’t work. The password needed to be updated.
Using SQL Management Studio:
alter user masteruser with password = '<password>'(Note: this SQL doesn’t work in Online Query Editor. You need to use Management Studio)
Previously, I posted about how to create a self-signed cert for development. Well, things change; here’s how to do it in 2025. (Or at least, here’s one way):
New-SelfSignedCertificate -CertStoreLocation Cert:\LocalMachine\My -DnsName "example.local" -FriendlyName "example.local" -NotAfter $([datetime]::now.AddYears(5)) -keyusage DigitalSignatureSo what’s the “KeyUsage” bit about? Well, it’s a certificate extension that restricts the purposes that a certificate can be used for.
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