ElasticSearch–Decrease the monitoring data

Quick tip to prevent the monitoring index to get out of control:

To decrease the amount of data of the ElasticSearch monitoring you can change the _cluster settings

More information: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/monitoring-settings.html

Azure DevOps–How to change the default iteration?

After upgrading to Azure DevOps 2019, I got a question from a customer asking how to change the default iteration used when creating new work items. By default the current iteration is used. If you are creating user stories, this is probably not what you want as these user stories should first be analyzed, groomed, … before they can be planned inside a specific iteration/sprint.

Fortunately this is something that can be changed easily at the team level:

• Click on the Show Team Profile  icon on the Kanban board:

• Click on Team settings:

• Go to Iterations and Areas:

• Click on Iterations:

• Now you change the default iteration how you want:

Fork–A fast and friendly GIT client

Tooling is important and great tools can make a difference. Especially when you are using so rich and complex as GIT can be.

Last week I discovered a new GIT client; Fork.

I was especially impressed by the interactive rebase functionality. Could be a lifesaver if you are now afraid to use rebase…

Remarks: My current favorite is GitKraken in case you want to know. But I’m giving Fork a try and so should you…

Orleans–Fire and forget

The basic building block in Orleans is a ‘Grain’. A grain is an atomic unit of isolation, distribution, and persistence. A grain perfectly matches the OO principles as it encapsulates state of an entity and encodes its behavior in the code logic.

The ‘normal’ way to communicate between Grains is through message passing. This is greatly simplified thanks to the async/await programming model in C# combined with some code generation voodoo. It almost ‘feels’ like normal method invocations.

A consequence of the async programming model is that you always should ‘await’ the results. However there are some situations where you don’t care about the results and want to call another grain in a ‘fire-and-forget’ mode.

To achieve this you can use the InvokeOneWay() extension method on a GrainReference:

Testing–Faking a delay in SQL Server

To test the timeout settings of my application, I needed a query that exceeds a certain time.

This was not that hard to achieve in SQL Server thanks to the WAITFOR statement. This statement blocks the execution of a batch, stored procedure, or transaction until a specified time or time interval is reached, or a specified statement modifies or returns at least one row.

----Delay for 10 seconds
WAITFOR DELAY '000:00:10'
SELECT 'Hello finally!'
GO

More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-elements/waitfor-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

MassTransit - A convention for the message type {typename} was not found

While preparing a presentation I created a simple demo app where I wanted to publish a message to a queue.

My first (naïve) attempt looked like this:

This failed with the following error message:

A convention for the message type {typename} was not found

What was my mistake?

In MassTransit you have to make a difference between sending a message and publishing a message. Whereas publishing a message doesn’t require any extra configuration, sending a message does. Why? Because when sending a message you directly target a queue. MassTransit has to know which queue the message should be send to.

We have 2 options to make this work:

1) You specify the target queue using a convention:

2) You use the ISendEndpointprovider to specify a queue:

Reconfigure the ElasticSearch Windows Service

If you are running ElasticSearch on a Windows Cluster you probably are using a Windows Service to run it in the background and make it start automatically at boot time.

This Windows Service feature is available out-of-the-box if you use the .zip package.

Some settings of ElasticSearch are managed as command-line arguments(e.g. the min and max memory usage). To manipulate these settings when using the Windows Service, you have to go through the ElasticSearch Windows Service Manager.

• To open the manager, go the ElasticSearch installation folder. (e.g. c:\elasticsearch-7.4.0\)
• Browse to the bin folder (where you should find a elasticsearch-service.bat file)
• Run the following command:
• elasticsearch-service.bat manager

This will open a GUI where you can manage multiple ElasticSearch settings:

Remark: Most changes will require a restart of the service.