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Applying the ‘Wisdom of the crowd’ effect in software development

I’m currently reading Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment , the latest book by Daniel Kahneman wo also wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow . I’m only halfway in the book but in one chapter the authors talk about an experiment done by 2 researchers, Edward Vul and Harold Pashler where they gave a person a specific question not once but twice . The hypothesis was that the average of 2 answers was always closer to the truth than each answer independently. And indeed they were right. One knows more than one Turns out that this is related to the wisdom-of-crowds-effect ; if you take the average of a number of independent answers from different people it typically leads to a more correct answer. I never heard about this effect before, but it turns out that I’m applying this principle for a long time based on something I discovered in the Righting Software book by Juval Löwy, the broadband estimation technique . This technique allows you to estimate the implementation effort for a c
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.NET 8 upgrade - error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET 8.0.

A colleague asked me to create a small fix on an existing library. I implemented the fix and decided to take the occasion to upgrade to .NET 8 as well. How hard can it be… Turns out that this was harder than I thought. After upgrading the target framework moniker to .NET 8, the build started to fail with the following (cryptic) error message: C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\6.0.407\Sdks\Microsoft.NET.Sdk\targets\Microsoft.NET.TargetFrameworkInference.targets(144,5): error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET 8.0.  Either target .NET 6.0 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET 8.0. .NET 8 was certainly installed on this machine, so that could not be the issue: Then I took a second look at the error message and I noticed something, the compiler was using the .NET 6 SDK although the application itself was configured to use .NET 8. Of course! Now I remembered. In this project I was using a global.json file. Through this file you c
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SQL Server - Use Table Valued parameters to construct an IN statement

A colleague created a stored procedure that returns some data from a specific table. Nothing special would you think and you are right. The only reason we were using a stored procedure here is that we had a very specific requirement that every attempt to read data from this specific table should be logged. Here is a simplified version of the stored procedure he created: What I want to talk about in this post is the usage of a (comma separated) string parameter that is used to construct the filter criteria for the query. Remark: This version of the stored procedure is already better than the original version that was using dynamic SQL to construct an IN clause: Using Table-Valued Parameters We can further improve the procedure above by using a table valued parameter. To use table-valued parameters instead of comma-separated strings in your stored procedure, you can follow these steps: Step 1: Create a Table-Valued Parameter Type First, you need to create a table-valued
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EF Core–Read and write models

Today I was working with a team that was implementing a CQRS architecture. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is a design pattern that separates the responsibilities of reading and writing data into distinct models. The idea is to use one model to handle commands (which modify data) and another model to handle queries (which retrieve data). This separation allows for better scalability, performance optimization, and flexibility, as the read and write operations can be independently optimized or scaled based on the specific needs of the system. After creating a read model for a specific table in the database, EF core started to complain and returned the following error message: System.InvalidOperationException : Cannot use table 'Categories' for entity type 'CategoryReadModel since it is being used for entity type 'Category' and potentially other entity types, but there is no linking relationship. Add a foreign key to 'CategoryReadModel' on the
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Architecting Your Team Setup: Aligning Teams with Software Design (and Vice Versa)

As software architects, we tend to focus heavily on the design of the systems we build—how the various components interact, the data flow, and the technology choices. But architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. One often overlooked element is how the structure of our teams can (and should) align with the architecture itself. The relationship between team setup and software design is symbiotic: your team’s structure influences the system’s architecture, and the architecture shapes how teams need to work together. Getting this alignment right can be the key to efficiency, scalability, and long-term success. Why Team Setup Matters in Software Architecture There’s an adage known as Conway’s Law , which states:  Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. In simple terms, the way your teams are structured will be reflected in your system’s architecture. If your teams d
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Implementing an OAuth client credentials flow with ADFS–Part 4–Understanding and fixing returned error codes

It looked like most of the world has made the switch to Microsoft Entra(Azure Active Directory). However one of my clients is still using ADFS. Unfortunately there isn't much information left on how to get an OAuth flow up and running in ADFS. Most of the links I found point to documentation that no longer exists. So therefore this short blog series to show you end-to-end how to get an OAuth Client Credentials flow configured in ADFS. Part 1 - ADFS configuration Part 2 – Application configuration Part 3 – Debugging the flow Part 4 (this post) – Understanding and fixing returned error codes Last post we updated our configuration so we could see any errors returned and are able to debug the authentication flow. In the first 2 posts I showed you everything that was needed to get up and running. The reality was that it took some trial and error to get everything up and running. In this post I share all the errors I got along the way and how I fixed them. IDX10204: Unabl
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Implementing an OAuth client credentials flow with ADFS–Part 3–Debugging the flow

It looked like most of the world has made the switch to Microsoft Entra(Azure Active Directory). However one of my clients is still using ADFS. Unfortunately there isn't much information left on how to get an OAuth flow up and running in ADFS. Most of the links I found point to documentation that no longer exists. So therefore this short blog series to show you end-to-end how to get an OAuth Client Credentials flow configured in ADFS. Part 1 - ADFS configuration Part 2 – Application configuration Part 3 (this post) – Debugging the flow In the first 2 posts I showed you the happy path. So if you did everything exactly as I showed, you should end up with a working Client Credentials flow in ADFS. Unfortunately there are a lot of small details that matter, and if you make one mistake you’ll end with a wide range of possible errors. In today’s post, I focus on the preparation work to help us debug the process and better understand what is going on. Updating your OAuth Confi
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