Deploying extra files when using WebDeploy

On one of the teams I’m coaching they are using Angular (4) in combination with ASP.NET Web API. This combination took a little more time to setup than for ASP.NET Core but worked quiet nice in the end.

In the current setup the Angular code is stored inside the ASP.NET Web API project:

To deploy the application to our servers, we configured a build process that contains the following steps:

Step 1 - Restoring the NuGet packages from our private package repository.
Step 2 – Compiling the .NET solution using MSBuild
Step 3 – Restore the NPM packages required for the Angular code
Step 4 – Execute the ng build command specify the environment and other parameters
Step 5 – Running the tests
Step 6 – Deploying the application using WebDeploy

After configuring all steps above, we noticed that everything was compiled nicely but after WebDeploy was completed only the C# assemblies were published on the web server. The files generated by Angular CLI were missing…

This makes sense as by default WebDeploy is only aware of the files that are tracked by the Visual Studio project inside the csproj file. To let WebDeploy know that some extra files need to be copied, we have to open up the .pubxml files and add some extra xml voodoo:

First add an extra target:

In this sample, we specify that we want to include all files in the dist folder and its subfolders(dist\**\*). The root of the folder is the same as the web project folder.

Second step is that we invoke this target before the web deploy file copy is executed or before the web deploy package is created:

That’s it!

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...

The art of simplicity

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