Setting up a Sitecore project works with both versions 5.3 and 6

Sitecore(SC) has a decent article on how to set up a Sitecore project on Visual Studio. This is a pretty good start but it does not quite meet our company’s requirements.

In this blog post I will attempt to tell you exactly how a structure a project assuming that you have the following requirements for your SC environment:

• You need to have multiple websites running on one instance of SC and you want each website to have its own Visual Studio project.
• You are not using a virtual folder per website.
• You want to manage multiple Class Library/Child projects within each website project.
• You want to keep the Renderings, Sub-layouts, Layouts, Associated files (css, js etc) and DLL’s of each website independent.

Our company has worked with multiple projects in Sitecore v5.3 and we have also Started a new project using Sitecore v6 (Visual Studio 2005 and 2008). I can safely say that we have come up with a tried and proven project structure that I can recommend that everyone can and should use. Please follow the SC developer cookbook if you are only going to ever have one website running on your instance of SC.

There is a fair bit to write on this entry and I will be slowly updating it, if anyone is in desperate need to this information right now then please leave a comment and I will try to speed things up!

ASP.NET service faulting error Sitecore 6 workaround

We have sitecore 6 environments working on Virtual Machines (VM’s). Sitecore 6 seems to cause an ASP error at seemingly random intervals leading to a total loss of service 9only on VM’s. Event Viewer will show you the following error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: (100)
Event ID: 1000
Date:  8/8/2008
Time:  4:09:35 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: SCTEST
Description:
Faulting application w3wp.exe, version 6.0.3790.3959, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0×709a2075.

Sitecore have provided a work-around for this. Set the following web.config entry to ‘false’ as show below:

<!–  ENABLE COUNTERS
Indicates if performance counters are enabled.
Default value: true
–>
<setting name=”Counters.Enabled” value=”false” />

We have made this change and it seems to get rid of the issue. Seems like Sitecores backend performance monitoring may be using some .NET 3.5 functionality that causes this error (this is just a guess).

See the SC forum for more details:

http://sdn5.sitecore.net/forum/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=11838#11838