For most organizations releasing and deploying are the same thing while in fact these are 2 separate things: Deployment: A technical handling where a new version of the software is deployed to a specific environment Release: A business handling where the customers are informed that a new version of the software is available and can be used As you combine these 2 handlings in one, releasing becomes a risky business. The same moment you roll out the code on production, your users are eagerly waiting to start using these new features they so desperately needed. At that moment, you don’t want that things go wrong. So what do most organizations do? They introduce long release cycles where an application has to go through multiple environments and test cycles before finally reaching production.And they try to reduce the risk by only going through this cycle one or 2 times a year. But while they are thinking that this limit the risk, it actually has an opposite effect. Th...
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I had to smile while reading following tweet… :-) QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv. — Bill Sempf (@sempf) 23 september 2014
If you are still in doubt if you should try F# or not; read the following blog post http://www.simontylercousins.net/does-the-language-you-use-make-a-difference-revisited/ . In this post Simon Cousins built the same application once using C# and a second time using F#. The results speak for themselves…
Some developers asked me to look into an issue they had with Entity Framework. A query that took milliseconds in SQL Server Management Studio, took minutes to execute when called through Entity Framework. I had no clue what was the issue, but the following blog post brought some insights: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/07/database-connection-hazards-with-entity-framework/ . This post brought me to the following MSDN article where I saw the following note: The trick is to call Entity Framework and materialize the results as quick as possible so the connection gets closed.
Starting from .NET 4.5 ASP.NET MVC supports async/await for the action methods on your controller: Something I wasn’t aware of until I saw this blog post that is possible to cancel an async requests on the server. I knew it was possible to cancel an AJAX request on the client but I didn’t know that this cancellation will be forwarded to the server. I thought that on the server the request continued but that the result was discarded. What you have to is to add a CancellationToken as an extra parameter to your action method:
With all the goodness that MicroServices has to offer, people think it’s the next silver bullet and don’t learn from their mistakes. I always have to think about this quote from Simon Brown : If you can't build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer? An interesting video in this regard, is the talk at NDC Oslo from Jimmy Bogard about SOLID Architecture in Slices not Layers. It doesn’t talk about MicroServices but brings some new insights in how to build nicely structured monoliths(and there is nothing wrong with that). SOLID Architecture in Slices not Layers - Jimmy Bogard from NDC Conferences on Vimeo .
Work Item Studio is a mobile app created by Microsoft’s ‘Garage’ team that allows Visual Studio Online users a way to create, edit and view work items. A Windows Phone version existed for quite some time, but now there is finally a version for Android as well. Some screenshots: Windows Phone: Android: You can download the app from the different stores: Google Play Store Microsoft Windows Phone Store
Angular.js is so 2014, now it’s React.js that is the new hot and shiny JavaScript framework. If you want to learn where all the fuzz is about, I can recommend the great React.js Introduction for people who know just enough jQuery to get by tutorial. This is the best beginner tutorial for React I found on the web. It walks you through the steps to build a Tweet Box using React.js. The nice thing is that every feature is first built using jQuery and then recreated using React. This really shows of the advantages that React has to offer.
Yesterday, I posted about the Code Snippets feature inside the Chrome Developer tools. One thing that is annoying is that you have to create your scripts locally and there is no built-in way to share them. Gleb Bahmutov brought a solution by sharing a code snippet to load your scripts dynamically. A good idea is to set up an internal site where you host all the snippets you want to share. These scripts can then be loaded using the following script: Note: By using this script it is possible to load snippets from any source. Be careful as this imposes a security risk if you load and execute scripts from other locations.
Today I discovered a nice feature inside the Chrome developer tools: Code snippets. Here are the steps to use it: Open Chrome . Hit F12 to load the Chrome Developer tools . Go to the Sources tab. On the Sources tab, you find a sub tab Snippets . Click on it. The first time you open it, it will be empty. Right click on the empty tab and choose New . A new snippet is created. You can choose a name and write the snippet code . When you are done writing your snippet, you can run it by right-clicking on it and choosing Run . Once the script is saved, it will be stored and is available each time you open up your Chrome Developer tools.
For some time, I had an error when opening a specific Visual Studio solution. After a problematic merge operation, the Team Foundation Server Source Control binding information inside my solution file didn’t match with the projects I had in my solution. If I opened up the sln file, I could find the following section: Global GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution SccNumberOfProjects = 92 SccEnterpriseProvider = {4CA58AB2-18FA-4F8D-95D4-32DDF27D184C} SccTeamFoundationServer = http://mytfsserver:8080/tfs/defaultcollection SccLocalPath0 = . The number of projects(92) was complete wrong. Visual Studio told me there should be 68 projects: I found an easy solution to fix this: Close the solution in Visual Studio Check...
While performance testing an Angular.js website, I ran the site through a few benchmarking tools like Google PageSpeed Insights , Yahoo’s YSlow , and so on… One of the recommendations that these tools returned is ‘Serve static content from a cookieless domain’. Although there is some discussion going on if this recommendation actually makes sense, I spend some time reconfiguring IIS to get this working so I can measure the impact myself. Here are the steps I took to get it working: Inside IIS I configured 2 websites: A Default Web Site that listens on port 80 and has a custom host header configured(I used www.test.com as an example) A second website CDN that also listens on port 80 and has a different custom header configured(I used cdn.test.com for this one) For the CDN site, disable ASP.NET session state, this prevents cookies from being returned by ASP.NET. Click on Session State . Set the Session State Mode on Not ...
For some application modules we are building, we are using NuGet as the deployment vehicle. Today I was working on the construction of the NuSpec file to see if the NuGet package is correctly configured and created. While testing, I didn’t update the package version, so I was always using the same version number. The problem is that through the UI, there is no way to reinstall a package. You can only upgrade a package or remove one. After browsing through the documentation I noticed that you can re-install an existing package from the Package Manager console using the following command: Update-Package –reinstall <packageName> This command was specifically created for my scenario, so problem solved I thought. However I noticed that although the package was removed and reinstalled, NuGet didn’t download the updated package from our internal NuGet server. Instead it keeps using the existing package in the Packages folder. Anyone who had the same problem? Note: ...
By default IIS blocks access to .config files and this for a very good reason. You don’t want to share your ASP.NET web.config file with the rest of the world. However in this case this was exactly what I wanted to do. As part of a reusable module we built, we wanted to provide a sample .config file explaining how the module should be configured. Here are the steps to get this done: Open the IIS Manager . Click on the website or virtual directory where you want to allow the download. Click on Request Filtering . Search for .config in the list of File Name Extensions . Select the item. Click on the Remove… button to remove the .config file from the list. Click on Allow File Name Extension… Specify .config as the extension Click OK . Now if you try to download the .config file, this will still fail with the following error message: HTTP Error 404.3 - Not Found The page you are requesting cannot be served becau...
On July 20th Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2015! To guarantee that the launch doesn’t happen unnoticed, Microsoft hosts an online release event. You will be able to engage in live, interactive Q&A sessions with the engineering team, as well as deep-dive into technical details covered in over 60 on-demand video sessions. You will also have the opportunity to see the Visual Studio developer team creating an end-to-end solution for an open-source project, leveraging the newest tools and technologies. More information on the Visual Studio website: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visualstudio-release-event-vs
If I have to phrase the concept of ‘ DevOps ’ in one sentence, it’s: “Run what you wrote” I think that by making developers(and by larger extend) teams responsible for the code they wrote and the failures it caused in production, they learn to write code that doesn’t fail(and if it fails at least it does it in a graceful matter). Does this mean that developers get to do all the work and the system administrator can all take a long vacation? Of course not, it means that the concept of cross-functional teams, as promoted by Scrum and other Agile methodologies, should extend outside the analysis, design, development and testing domain and reach into operations. Only then, we can talk about truly cross-functional teams.
A must read for every (aspiring) manager. (Click on the links to read the full article): Management Myth 1: The myth of 100% Utilization Management Myth #2: Only the ‘Expert’ Can Perform This Work Management Myth #3: We Must Treat Everyone the Same Way Management Myth #4: I Don’t Need One-on-Ones Management Myth #5: We Can and Must Have an Objective Ranking System Management Myth #6: I Can Save Everyone Management Myth #7: I Am Too Valuable to Take a Vacation Management Myth #8: I Can Still Do Significant Technical Work Management Myth #9: We Have No Time for Training Management Myth #10: I Can Measure the Work by the Time People Spend at Work Management Myth #11: The Team Needs a Cheerleader! Management Myth #12: I Must Promote the Best Technical Person to Be a Manager Management Myth 13: I Must Never Admit My Mistakes Management Myth 14: I Must Always Have a Solution to the Problem Management Myth 15: I Need P...
As a windows user, I never liked NPM (Node Package Manager), the node.js package manager. In contrast to Nuget, where the package folder structure is flat, with NPM you have packages inside packages inside packages and so on… The Windows file system doesn’t like this and you can end up with folders you cannot remove with any of the standard tools.(Tip: use 7zip to delete the folder.) With the announcement of the beta of npm 3.0, this problem is finally history. NPM 3.0 introduces flattened packages(they call it deduping, if this is a real verb). Here is the announcement on GitHub : Flat, flat, flat! Your dependencies will now be installed maximally flat. Insofar as is possible, all of your dependencies, and their dependencies, and THEIR dependencies will be installed in your project's node_modules folder with no nesting. You'll only see modules nested underneath one another when two (or more) modules have conflicting dependencies. #3697 This will hop...
On a panel discussion Anders Hejlsberg stated the following quote: “ […] you can write large programs in JavaScript. You just can’t maintain them. ”. This explains in one sentence the reasoning to build Typescript … Here is the video :