The art of simplicity

Recently I lost a good chunk of a day chasing an issue in our OWASP Dependency-Track container setup. The strange part: the problem had nothing to do with Dependency-Track itself. It was how I had configured it.   What went wrong I had pinned our docker-compose.yml to a snapshot tag, something like dependencytrack/apiserver:4-snapshot . In my head, a tag like that behaves like a version number: you pull it once, it stays what it is, and you move on. That assumption is wrong. Snapshot tags on Docker Hub are not static. They get overwritten every time a new build lands upstream. The 4-snapshot and 5-snapshot tags on the dependencytrack/apiserver and dependencytrack/frontend repositories are pushed regularly, sometimes daily. So the image I "pinned" last month is not the image I got today, even though the tag in my compose file never changed. Remark: The Dependency-Track docs are actually explicit about this: the latest tag always points to the latest stable ...

There's a moment when you're deep into an agentic coding session and you have to leave your desk (time to catch my train!). Normally that means the session just sits there, waiting, until you're back at your keyboard. Both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI recently shipped a feature that fixes exactly this: you keep the session running locally, but you can check in, approve tool calls, and keep steering it from your phone or any browser. Let's look at how each one works. Claude Code: /remote-control In Claude Code, you enable this with a slash command inside a running session: /remote-control or the short form: /rc You can also start a session already remote-enabled: claude --remote-control or run a dedicated server process that can host multiple concurrent sessions: claude remote-control Whichever way you start it, Claude Code prints a session URL (and lets you press spacebar to show a QR code) that connects to claude.ai/code or the Claude app. ...

When a pipeline run fails and the regular logs don't tell you enough, Azure DevOps has a built-in way to get more detail: system diagnostics. The classic way to turn it on is the "Enable system diagnostics" checkbox you get when you manually queue a run. But if your pipeline is defined in YAML and runs automatically on every push, there's no checkbox to click. The checkbox approach When you queue a pipeline manually, click Run pipeline and you'll see an  Advanced options section with an Enable system diagnostics checkbox. Tick it, hit Run , and that single run gets verbose logging: purple-colored debug lines, extra detail on what each task is doing under the hood. Remark: this only affects the run you're queuing. It doesn't persist, and it's useless for CI-triggered runs where nobody is manually clicking Run. The YAML equivalent: system.debug For YAML pipelines, the checkbox maps directly to a variable: system.debug . Set it to true a...

There's a moment when a transaction fails halfway through, and you realize rolling back everything is overkill. You did five inserts, the sixth one violates a constraint, and you'd rather undo just that last operation than start the whole transaction over. That's what savepoints are for, and EF Core has supported them for a while now but until recently I didn't know this feature existed. What's the problem with plain transactions? A regular database transaction is all-or-nothing. Something like this: using var transaction = await context.Database.BeginTransactionAsync(); try { context.Blogs.Add(new Blog { Url = "https://blog1.com" }); await context.SaveChangesAsync(); context.Blogs.Add(new Blog { Url = "https://blog2.com" }); await context.SaveChangesAsync(); // this one fails context.Blogs.Add(new Blog { Url = null }); await context.SaveChangesAsync(); await transaction.CommitAsync(); } catch { a...

In my passthrough authentication post , the login endpoint set a provider value on AuthenticationProperties so the OpenIddict server would know whether to challenge GitHub or ADFS: app.MapGet("login/{provider}", (string provider) => Results.Challenge(new AuthenticationProperties { RedirectUri = "/", Items = { ["provider"] = provider } }, [OpenIddictClientAspNetCoreDefaults.AuthenticationScheme])); Run that as-is and the server never sees it. Items round-trips through your own app's correlation cookie — it was never meant to become part of the outgoing OAuth2 request. Why this doesn't just work AuthenticationProperties.Items is an ASP.NET Core concept. It's how the authentication middleware remembers things like the redirect URI across the round trip to an external provider and back. The OpenIddict client builds the actual /connect/authorize request from a completely different object — an OpenIddictReq...

In most enterprise applications authentication is externalized to an external identity provider. For our applications we had to support multiple identity providers. How can we do this without tight coupling to each of these providers? In this post we'll bring OpenIddict into the picture and show how it helps to solve this nicely. What is OpenIddict? OpenIddict is an open-source OAuth2/OpenID Connect server and client stack for .NET. It plugs into ASP.NET Core Identity (or your own user store) and lets you run your own authorization server instead of depending fully on an external one. You get the standard endpoints — /connect/authorize , /connect/token , /connect/userinfo — backed by your own database and your own claims. That's exactly what makes the passthrough pattern possible: OpenIddict is the piece in the middle that can defer to external providers for the actual authentication, then still be the one issuing the token your APIs trust. The naive approach The ...