If you're like me you've probably (more than once) had to read/search through several pages of release notes to find out if the issue you are currently having (or a bug you have reported earlier) has been fixed in any of the latest Sitecore releases.

Well, at some point I got tired of that and also wanted to expand my Azure-knowledge and wanted to try out Azure Search for something - so I ended up making SitecoreReleaseNotes.com, go check it out.

What is it?

It's a site that allows you to search for words or issue numbers mentioned in the Sitecore XP release notes located on https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Sitecore_Experience_Platform.aspx. That means all release notes from 8.0 and onward.

It will return a list of the 5 most relevant releases for your search query, showing what it matched and with a link to both the release notes and the download page.

It doesn't allow complicated/specialized queries but it works very well for issue numbers and most simple queries.

How does it work?

It is rather simple, actually. It is just an Azure Function that crawls the downloads page daily and indexes all the release notes into Azure Search. The site itself is more or less just a simple interface to query the index and display the results nicely, running as an Azure Web App.

Most of the Azure services (Functions, Search, Web App/App Service) can use the free tier (or a very cheap one). It's also possible to use the free tier for the Web App, but I've gone with the B1 (Basic) for the SSL support, custom domain and the "Always On" options.

The crawling is scheduled to run daily, but it only takes ~15 seconds so it could be run more often - but Sitecore doesn't put out new releases THAT often and I can live with up to a one day delay.

How can I get involved?

The code is available on Github. You are more than welcome to create an issue if you have any feature requests, or even better submit a pull request!

The code is not that pretty as it just barely got past the prototype stage, to a stage where I was comfortable showing it off to the public.

Do you plan on improving it?

Maybe, it depends. I don't have any plans right now as it currently fills most of my own needs. I have plenty of ideas but there is only so much time in a day and it is competing with other more interesting stuff.

If it gains a lot of traction and interest I might get back into it at some point, but otherwise I hope it's useful for some people as it is now.