The art of simplicity

Yesterday I wanted to do some performance testing before we put a new application into production. However when I opened Visual Studio (2017) I couldn’t find the Web performance and load testing tools. Are there no longer available in VS 2017? Luckily, they still are. But they are not installed out-of-the-box. Let’s open the Visual Studio installer and fix this: Search for Visual Studio Installer and execute it Click on More –> Modify Go to the Individual components tab, scroll to the Debugging and testing section and select Web performance and load testing tools . Click Modify to start the installation

C# 7 introduces the concept of local functions. Local functions can be nested in other functions similar to anonymous delegates or lambda expressions. Doesn’t this make local functions redundant? Not at all, anonymous functions and lambda expressions have certain restrictions that local functions have not. Here is a list of things a local function can do that lambda’s can’t: Local functions can be called without converting them to a delegate Local functions can be recursive Local functions can be iterators Local functions can be generic Local functions have strictly more precise definite assignment rules In certain cases, local functions do not need to allocate memory on the heap More information can be found at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/classes-and-structs/local-functions https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seteplia/2017/10/03/dissecting-the-local-functions-in-...

In case you are wondering how to cancel a pending HTTP request, here is the (simple) answer.  You can do this by calling unsubscribe on the Subscription object returned by the  subscribe method. An example:

A colleague sent me the following screenshot with an error he got after switching to an AOT build in Angular: Here is the related TypeScript file for this component: The problem was caused by the “template: require('./perceel-list.component.html')” statement in the component file. The aot build doesn’t like it when you try to resolve html templates dynamically. Removing the require and just using the templateUrl instead solved the problem:

Did you know that you can pass a “--prod” parameter when executing compiling your Angular code using “ng build” ? The "--prod” option also has a development counterpart “--dev”. They will set the following list of parameters: Flag --dev --prod --aot false true --environment dev prod --output-hashing media all --sourcemaps true false --extract-css false true --named-chunks true false More information: https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/wiki/build

By default Swagger exposes enums in your API definitions as numbers which makes it not easy to understand what a specific parameter value means. You can configure Swagger to expose enums using string names instead. Therefore add the following line to your Swagger configuration:   c .DescribeAllEnumsAsStrings();

In our package.json we defined some script commands to automate certain actions. However sometimes we want to add extra parameters to the script when executing it. This is possible by adding an extra pair of dashes  and the extra parameter when executing the command: ngbuild -- --environment=local

In case you missed .NET Conf 2017 , all the videos are available online on Channel 9 .

The SQL Server Full Text Search option is really powerful. However you need to be aware that by default a search is always done on a full word. For example if you had indexed ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ and you search for ‘brow’ you don’t get a result back. To solve this you can use wildcards, but you have to be aware that you put the full search term between quotes. This query will not work: SELECT BookID,BookTitle FROM Books WHERE CONTAINS(BookTitle, 'brow*' ) But this query will: SELECT BookID,BookTitle FROM Books WHERE CONTAINS(BookTitle, '"brow*"' )

After following the steps in the Angular documentation to setup internationalization(i18n) support, I tried to execute my brand new i18n npm command: PS C:\Projects\test\AngularLocalization\angularlocal> npm run i18n > angularlocal@0.0.0 i18n C:\Projects\test\AngularLocalization\angularlocal > ng-xi18n TypeError: Cannot read property 'toLowerCase' of null     at Extractor.serialize (C:\Projects\test\AngularLocalization\angularlocal\node_modules\@an gular\compiler-cli\src\extractor.js:47:32)     at C:\Projects\test\AngularLocalization\angularlocal\node_modules\@angular\compiler-cli\sr c\extractor.js:33:33     at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:109:7)     at Module.runMain (module.js:606:11) at run (bootstrap_node.js:389:7)     at startup (bootstrap_node.js:149:9)     at bootstrap_node.js:502:3 Extraction failed ...

Sometimes when working with C# you discover some hidden gems. Some of them very useful, other ones a little bit harder to find a good way to benefit from their functionality. One of those hidden gems that I discovered some days ago are Expression Evaluator Format Specifiers . What is it? Expression Evaluator Format Specifies come into the picture when you are debugging in Visual Studio. The part of the debugger that processes the language being debugged is known as the expression evaluator (EE). A different expression evaluator is used for each language, though a default is selected if the language cannot be determined. A format specifier , in the debugger, is a special syntax to tell the EE how to interpret the expression being examined. You can read about all of the format specifiers in the documentation . One of really useful format specifiers is the ‘ac’ (always calculate) format specifier. This format specifier will force evaluation of the expression on every step. This is...

Most applications I’ve seen don’t take advantage of the power of the type system and fall back to primitive types like string, int, … . But what if you start using the type system to design a more understandable and less buggy application? You don’t believe it is possible? Have a look at the Designing with Types blog series, it will change the way you write your code forever… The complete list of posts: 1. Designing with types: Introduction Making design more transparent and improving correctness 2. Designing with types: Single case union types Adding meaning to primitive types 3. Designing with types: Making illegal states unrepresentable Encoding business logic in types 4. Designing with types: Discovering new concepts Gaining deeper insight into the domain 5. Designing with types: Making state explicit Using state machines to ensure correctness 6. Designing with types: Constrained strings Adding more semantic information to a p...

To optimize your application it can be useful to investigate all the things that are loaded and used inside your webpack bundles. A great tool to visualize this information is the webpack dependency analyzer: https://www.npmjs.com/package/webpack-bundle-analyzer From the documentation: The Webpack dependency analyzer is a Webpack plugin and CLI utility that represents bundle content as convenient interactive zoomable treemap This module will help you: Realize what's really inside your bundle Find out what modules make up the most of it's size Find modules that got there by mistake Optimize it! How to use it inside your Angular app? Install the bundle through npm: npm install webpack-bundle-analyzer Update your package.json with an extra command: "analyze": "ng build --prod --stats-json && webpack-bundle-analyzer dist/stats.json" Invoke the command through npm npm run analyze ...

If you are hosting your ASP.NET applications inside IIS I have a great tip for you: https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs-iis This GitHub project contains a list of boilerplate web.config files applying some best practices(like security hardening) and taking maximal advantage of the powerfull functionality that IIS has to offer. It shows and explains how to: Apply security through obscurity by not exposing specific information through the headers Apply GZIP compression on static content Disable tracing Secure your cookies Cache static content Support cache busting …

ASP.NET Core references a particular environment variable, ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT to describe the environment the application is currently running in. This variable can be set to any value you like, but 3 values are used by convention: Development , Staging , and Production . Based on this information the ASP.NET Core configuration system can load specific configuration settings (through .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true) ) or execute a specific Startup class or Startup method through the Startup conventions(e.g. a Startup{EnvironmentName} class or a Configure{EnvironmentName}() method inside the Startup class). At one customer we are hosting our ASP.NET Core applications inside IIS. The IIS environment is used both for development and testing. So we want to host the same application twice with a different environment setting. By default the environment setting is loaded from a system level environment variable which of course c...

ASP.NET Core 2.0 introduces a new model for authentication which requires some changes when upgrading your existing ASP.NET Core 1.x applications to 2.0. In ASP.NET Core 1.x, every auth scheme had its own middleware, and startup looked something like this: In ASP.NET Core 2.0, there is now only a single Authentication middleware, and each authentication scheme is registered during ConfigureServices() instead of during Configure(): More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/migration/1x-to-2x/identity-2x

With the introduction of a new HttpClient in Angular 4.3, an old feature of Angular.js was re-introduced; HttpInterceptors. Interceptors are sitting between the application and the backend and allow you to transform a request coming from the application before it is actually submitted to the backend. And of course you when a response arrivers from the backend an interceptor can transform it before delivering it to your application logic. This allows us to simplify the interaction with the backend in our Angular app and hide most of the shared logic inside an interceptor. Let’s create a simple example that injects an OAuth token in our requests: To be able to use the interceptor, you’ll have to register it: