Best Practices – Solution Code

Sitecore recommended practices for solution code:

• Sitecore highly recommends using C#. All of the Sitecore programming examples are in C# and C# is the language spoken by Sitecore Support.
• Use GUIDs where possible instead of path / name. This will improve performance, as well as prevent any breakage if you move content to a new location in the content tree.
• Use the Sitecore Search API instead of query or fast query. This allows querying based on indexes, rather than the content structure.
• Follow best practices for Web, Windows, IIS, ASP.NET, XML, XSL, SQL, .NET, CSS, JavaScript, and other technologies. For example, comment your code to describe the intent, not the implementation.
• Avoid //, descendant and descendant-or-self axis in XSL renderings.
• Use App_Config/Include files instead of directly modifying the web.config file.
• Don’t hardcode information in the code, use <settings> in a *.config file.
• Use parameters and properties when creating pipelines/events.
• Don’t hardcode labels and other static text information, consider modeling it with items, or create a dictionary in Sitecore.