Today I needed to sort sellable items based on the listprice, which required me to do a deep dive into the SXC9 price calculation. This turned out to be not that trivial, so here are my notes:

Look at the new Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 engine and you will find that the engine itself is just a shell: the core functionality is implemented as plugins. Extending the engine can be done by creating your own plugins.

When I was trying to get the Sitecore 9 xp0 topology working, I ran into an issue with the xConnect SQL shard deployment. I installed everything using the SIF scripts and it seemed to have installed fine, but I found connection errors in the xConnect logs:

Sitecore eXperience Commerce 9 is expected to be released in Q1 of 2018. This new version will contain no more COM+ components and is build on .NET core. This means that we should be able to run it on Docker! To get ready for that I wanted to see if I could get the Sitecore 9 xp0 topology running on Docker. Per Manniche Bering, who knows a lot more about Docker than I do, already has Sitecore 9 XM1 running on Docker in this repository. So I wanted to see if I could use his work and add the services needed for xp0. Currently, I got most of it running on docker and will share the repository shortly. For now, I wanted to share some lessons I learned during the process and hopefully safe people some time. As a disclaimer, I am by no means a Docker or infrastructure expert. Any feedback is more than welcome!

Last week, the Mercury team attended the Sitecore Symposium in Las Vegas. There were a lot of great announcements, not least that Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is to be launched in Q1 of 2018. Although Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1. was a huge step forward, it is a hybrid between old and new versions, which brought its own complexity.

I’m a big fan of Visual Studio Code. It’s fast, extensible and it even runs cross platform. Recently it has gotten build in support for merging. Before, I was using Diffmerge as my merge tool of choice, but I find the 3-way merge view with the remote, base and local files a bit confusing. Visual Studio Code just shows one file and shows the differences inline:

Last year we started the development of Mercury, which is a generic E-commerce solution based on Sitecore & Commerce server. Learn more about Mercury here. Over the years we have gained a lot of experience building E-commerce solutions. One of the things we wanted to do better with Mercury was to improve the User Experience, by using more client-side technology and by optimizing our usage of the browsers. This led us to find a client-side technology that would best fit our requirements. These days the amount of JavaScript frameworks is overwhelming, but in the end we went for Facebook’s React. In this article you will learn why.

Sitecore (development) environments can be quite complex. Especially when you are using additional software like Sitecore Commerce Server or Coveo. Next to this certain dependencies can change, for example updating certain dependencies in this enviroment.

The last week I was lucky to be attending the Microsoft Build conference in Redmond. In this post I’ll be sharing my experience. In essence it comes to this: Although I was a bit disappointed by the level of the sessions, I learned a lot about the Windows 8/ Windows Phone 8/ Windows Azure platform and I’m convinced that this ecosystems has great potential and that gives us all the tools we need to build some great apps. (Good job Mr. Ballmer, I already sound like you)