The art of simplicity

If you ever did a merge operation in Visual Studio and you had merge conflicts to resolve, know that you were using VsDiffMerge.exe behind the scenes. But did you know that you can use this tool as well to compare local files that are not under source control? Let’s demonstrate… The VsDiffMerge.exe tool can be found inside your Visual Studio directory (for VS 2017: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE) To compare 2 files, you have to pass the filepath as an argument to the tool: vsdiffmerge.exe" "File1" "File2" An example: vsdiffmerge.exe" "UnitTest1.cs" "UnitTest2.cs" starts up the Visual Studio IDE with “UnitTest1.cs” and “UnitTest2.cs” opened:

Flexbox is a ‘new’ way to layout your html page in CSS. No longer you need to use things like floats and positioning for creating CSS layouts. Instead you get a more flexible approach that scales from smartphone to smarttv. Browsers start to pick up this technique, so it’s time that you start learning it. From MDN : When elements are laid out as flexible boxes, they are laid out along two axes: The main axis is the axis running in the direction the flex items are being laid out in (e.g. as rows across the page, or columns down the page.) The start and end of this axis are called the main start and main end . The cross axis is the axis running perpendicular to the direction the flex items are being laid out in. The start and end of this axis are called the cross start and cross end . The parent element that has display: flex set on it (the <section> in our example) is called the flex container . The items being laid out as flexible boxes...

After enabling .NET Core on my web server I was finally ready to run my ASP.NET Core app. Or at least that was what I thought… When I opened my browser IIS welcomed me with the following error message: After enabling stdout logging inside the web.config of my ASP.NET Core app I saw following error: The specified framework 'Microsoft.NETCore.App', version '1.1.2' was not found.   - Check application dependencies and target a framework version installed at:       C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.NETCore.App   - The following versions are installed:       1.0.4       1.1.1   - Alternatively, install the framework version '1.1.2'. That is great and meaningful error message. I downloaded the latest runtime version 1.1.2, installed it, and was good to go!

Just a quick reminder for myself. Lost some time last week searching how to be able to run .NET Core apps in IIS on my webserver. The trick is that you need to install the .NET Core Windows Server Hosting bundle. Install the .NET Core Windows Server Hosting bundle on the hosting system. The bundle will install the .NET Core Runtime, .NET Core Library, and the ASP.NET Core Module . The module creates the reverse-proxy between IIS and the Kestrel server. Note: If the system doesn't have an Internet connection, obtain and install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable before installing the .NET Core Windows Server Hosting bundle. Restart the system or execute net stop was /y followed by net start w3svc from a command prompt to pick up a change to the system PATH. Create a new Application Pool . Set the .NET Framework version to ‘No Managed Code’ . More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/publishing/iis

Last week I got into trouble when trying to use msdeploy for an ASP.NET Core app. Where I got no problems for the ‘old’ ASP.NET applications, every time I tried to deploy an ASP.NET Core app I got the following error message: ERROR_USER_UNAUTHORIZED I logged in on the target server and find a little bit more information in the Event Viewer: IISWMSVC_AUTHORIZATION_SERVER_NOT_ALLOWED Only Windows Administrators are allowed to connect using a server connection. Other users should use the 'Connect To Site or Application' task to be able to connect. I was 100% sure that everything was configured correctly on the server. I used exactly the same steps as for my other applications, the only difference was that this was an ASP.NET Core app. After some testing, I found an approach that worked for me: Here are the things I had to change inside my Web Deploy pubxml file: Added UseMsDeployExe statement(gave me more control on the parameters passed) Added...

After upgrading to Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2, building some of my projects started to fail with the following error message: Build Failure. Error: 'path' cannot be an empty string ("") or start with the null character. The problem only appeared for projects where I enabled the lightweight solution loading feature. Lightweight solution loading: Many common tasks, such as navigating through your codebase, editing code, and building your projects will not require any projects to be loaded at all. Therefore Microsoft created the lightweight Solution load feature. The effect is that Visual Studio will not fully load projects until you start working with them increasing performance especially for large projects. As the problem only happened for these projects, I decided to disable Lightweight solution load again. This indeed solved the problem for me(note: I had to close and reopen the solution before I saw an effect). Hopefully a bug fix wil...

In the context of software architecture, people sometimes talk about Conway’s Law: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. Although we apply it on software architecture, this definition is originally created in a more broader sense. If you are interested in reading the original paper, go check it out here; http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html The original paper in PDF format can be found here; http://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf

I’m not a big fan of NPM, it’s not persé the fault of the tool itself but you don’t get happy when you end up with 1000’s of packages and any package change has a ripple effect through your code base. It even gets better when package creators don’t follow the semantic versioning rules and breaking changes appear without a warning. Everything I have to open up a new codebased and NPM starts its magic behind the scenes, it is not without fear that I first start compiling my code. Sidenote: You can say similar things about any other packaging tool I guess, e.g. NuGet But hey, enough complaining, time for some good news. Last month, the NPM released version 5 and they promised a lot of improvements. The announcement: Starting today, typing `npm install npm@latest -g` will update you to npm version 5.0.1. npm@5 is all new and packed with performance, reliability, and usability improvements we know you’ll love. These include a new approach to lockfiles, more robust caching,...

After upgrading to Angular 4, my Visual Studio turned red from all the TypeScript errors. Some samples: /node_modules/@angular/material/typings/button/button.d.ts(40,22): error TS2420: Class 'MdButton' incorrectly implements interface 'CanDisable'. Property 'disabled' is missing in type 'MdButton'. /node_modules/@angular/material/typings/button/button.d.ts(40,39): error TS2507: Type '(new (...args: any[]) => CanDisable) & typeof MdButtonBase' is not a constructor function type. The strange thing was, that when I used the Angular CLI and ng build(or serve) no errors appeared and everything seemed to work. I first tried to remove my node_modules folder and do a clean install –> didn’t help Then I removed my globally installed node_modules and reinstalled them as well –> didn’t help Then I upgraded my TypeScript version and the related Visual Studio tooling –> didn’t help In the end I found a solution ...

I’m always disappointed to see the amount of work to get your application setup done(you know the typical ‘Sprint 0’ work). Creating your frontend and backend projects, setting up your authentication and authorization, configure the webpack magic and so on… Before you know it you are 2 weeks in your project and you didn’t deliver a single bit of business functionality. So every tool, framework or library that can help you get up to speed is a welcome addition to our toolbox. Recently I discovered QuickApp, an ASP.NET Core/AngularX Project Template . From the documentation : This application consists of: Template pages using Angular4 and TypeScript RESTful API Backend using ASP.NET Core MVC Web API Database using Entity Framework Core Authentication based on OpenID Connect API Documentation using Swagger Webpack2 for managing client-side libraries Theming using Bootstrap You get the benefits of: A complete backend ...

Today during our ‘Bug Fix Friday’ we were discussing how to rewrite a rather complex loop construction using a more functional style syntax. As we were all C# developers, the equivalent of what we wanted to achieve in JavaScript was what C# offers through the .Any() LINQ operation. So the discussion was if their was a similar approach possible in JavaScript? And the answer is… of course! The Array.prototype.some() method did exactly what we needed. From MDN : some() executes the callback function once for each element present in the array until it finds one where callback returns a truthy value (a value that becomes true when converted to a Boolean). If such an element is found, some() immediately returns true . Otherwise, some() returns false . callback is invoked only for indexes of the array which have assigned values; it is not invoked for indexes which have been deleted or which have never been assigned values. An example:

After upgrading to .NET 4.6.2 we started noticing problems with our ASP.NET MVC applications. We intesively use caching to limit the load on our web servers. This is easy to implement thanks to the OutputCache attribute in MVC. The problem we noticed after upgrading was that the max-age in the response headers was no longer correct after hitting the cache. An example: We had the following OutputCache attribute on top of our MVC controller: [OutputCache(Duration = 86400 )] When executing the first request, we see the following response heade Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400 On all subsequent requests, we see the following Cache-Control: public, max-age=63623538558 More information: https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet/issues/330 Remark: This problem is fixed in .NET 4.7 and a specific quality update .

After upgrading my Windows 10 installation to the Anniversary Update, I noticed that I had two windows folders; windows & windows.old. Both were eating up a lot of disk space, but I had no clue if I could safely delete the windows.old folder. The windows.old folder contains all information about your previous windows version. Idea is that if you want to roll back to the old version, it’s possible through the recovery option. Windows will automatically clean up the old folder after some time but if you can’t wait here is a (safe) alternative: Open Windows Explorer . Right click on the drive that contains your Windows installation. Choose Properties . Click the Disk Cleanup button on the General tab. After the Disk Cleanup tool is done calculating, click on the Cleanup System Files button. Select the Previous Windows Installation(s) option to delete the Windows.old folder Remark: I noticed that if you don’t run the Disk Cleanup tool as an administrato...

Most of the people I have the pleasure to work with are developers, all great, intelligent people with passion for technology and IT. When I talk with them about their career and how they think they should evolve, a lot of them aspire to become an architect. Now the job title architect can mean a lot of different things, but that is not the topic I want to rant about today … *** START RANT *** I’m a little bit puzzled why a lot of developers think that becoming an architect is the logical way forward. Why you ask me? Let me explain… Developers are creative people, great thinkers and problem solvers. They like to tackle complex problems, that’s what they live for. Once they are no more problems to solve, they start to get bored and start looking at new frameworks and tools just to have new problems to tackle. Developers LOVE complexity. “Developers are attracted to complexity like moths to a flame” As an architect it is quite the opposite. You are not aiming for sprints bu...

I’m a big fan of the Angular CLI, it makes working with Angular a lot easier and guarantees a level of consistenty between all team members. But I noticed that some people get into trouble the moment they try to host their application in IIS. Most of the time you don’t host your Angular app directly under the Default Website, instead you add a virtual application and host your files in it. Problem is that if you just do an ‘ng build’ and copy the dist folder to your target directory, it will probably not work. When you browse to the URI, you only get a ‘loading…’ message and nothing seems to happen. Inside the console, you see that the Angular application tries to load all your bundles from ‘http://localhost’ instead of ‘http://localhost/sampleapp’: To fix this you have to specify some extra parameters when building your Angular app for distribution: ng build --deploy-url "/sampleapp" --base-href="/sampleapp" That should do the trick…