Using a Clean Sitecore Client for Authoring

I had a situation this week where I could not get the Sitecore client to work on my local machine. Although I could browse the end web site, I got the dreaded vague null reference exception when trying to browse to /sitecore. As the web site was fairly complex, I was finding it very painful to try to re-contruct from new. In the end, it dawned on me that all I needed to do was install a clean Sitecore client that was completely separate from the web site. This gave me the ability to change content, while the end web site enabled me to view the effect of code changes. This set-up has other benefits too; the Sitecore client runs unimpeded by any custom code (unless you are using pipelines, etc.). This makes it easier to identify/eliminate custom code as a possible cause for any slowness. Similarly, you can readily identify if any errors in the log are due to your code.