The art of simplicity

After creating a new mapping file using the code mapping feature in NHibernate, it didn’t work when I tried to persist an instance of the object. Instead I got the following error message: NHibernate.MappingException: No persister for: Sample.Product Here is the mapping file I’m using: Do you notice what’s wrong? …. I forgot to make my mapping class public: public class ProductMapping: ClassMapping<Product>

On one of my SQL Server Reporting Services reports, I had to use some custom logic. Instead of embedding the code directly into the report, I decided to create a separate assembly which makes it easier to test and debug this code. After importing the assembly in my Visual Studio 2017 Reporting Services project, I couldn’t load the Report Designer preview window anymore. Instead I got the following error message: An error occured during local report processing. The definition of the report ‘/samplereport’ is invalid. Error while loading code module: ‘Sample.Barcode, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’. Details: Could not load file or assembly ‘Sample.Barcode, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. To fix this I had to copy the DLL to the following location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\SSRS ...

By default WIF uses a built-in SessionSecurityTokenHandler to serialize the session token to and from the cookie. Behind the scenes this tokenhandler uses the Data Protection API (DPAPI) to protect the cookie material. DPAPI uses a key that is specific to the computer on which it is running in its protection algorithms. For this reason, the default session token handler is not usable in Web farm scenarios because, in such scenarios, tokens written on one computer may need to be read on another computer. As a solution you can switch the default SessionSecurityTokenHandler by a machine key based alternative: After doing that, there is one extra step required. The default IIS configuration autogenerates a machine key per application pool. To generate a specific key and copy it to all server instances on your web farm, remove the checkboxes next to the ‘Automatically generate at runtime’ option and choose Generate Keys from the action menu on the right. Now you can copy and ...

F# 4.5 introduces the match! keyword which allows you to inline a call to another computation expression and pattern match on its result. Let’s have an example. Here is the code I had to write before F# 4.5: Notice that I have to bind the result of callServiceAsync before I can pattern match on it. Now let’s see how we can simplify this using the ‘match!’ keyword: When calling a computation expression with match! , it will realize the result of the call like let! . This is often used when calling a computation expression where the result is an optional .

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Although this quote had nothing to do with Service Fabric, it could be applicable there as well. Service Fabric brings the power of PaaS close to you, unfortunately it does come with its own set of problems and difficulties. And once you get stuck there isn’t much information out there to help you find a solution (ask me how I know). One of the resources that helped me a lot were the Service Fabric Troubleshooting guides , these are the same guides used by the Azure Customer Support Services and Product Group Site Reliability Engineers. It’s a combination of guides, troubleshooting tips and scripts that can help you find the root cause of your Service Fabric related problems. A must have for every Service Fabric administrator(and developer).

Did you know that ASP.NET Web API allows you to batch requests? Batching packs several API requests together and send them in one HTTP request. The responses will be grouped in one single HTTP response as well. There isn’t much you need to do to configure this on the server, just add a specific route to your route table with batching enabled: The important things to notice are the following: The DefaultHttpBatchHandler executes each request sequentially, but in case you don’t have any dependency between requests, you can set a property to make execution non-sequential. The MapHttpBatchRoute route template can contain parameters. So, in case you create your own batch handler, you can pass in parameters to it. If you don’t need the sequential behavior you can create your own HttpBatchHandler and override the execution order property: That’s all that is required to enable batching on the server. Let’s now see how to use this on the client: This is a little known fea...

After opening an ‘old’ Reporting Services project, we got the following exception message when we tried to build the report: Custom parameter layout was detected in the report. SQL Server 2014 Reporting Services and earlier do not support custom parameter layout. Either reduce the error level to a value less than 3 or change the TargetServerVersion to a version that supports custom parameter layout. To fix this error, you have to go to the Report properties: Right click on your Reporting Services Project , and choose Properties . Change the TargetServerVersion to SQL Server 2016 or later

One nice feature I discovered recently in Postman is the ability to generate code from your API requests. Here are the steps: Open Postman Select a collection and click on a specific request Click on Code on the right. The generate code snippets window is loaded. Choose the language you want to use and click Copy to clipboard If you are using C#, the code snippets are generated using the RestSharp library

Postman makes it easy to create a collection of requests based on your OpenAPI specification. So if you are using Swagger (through Swashbuckle in .NET) importing your API specification is just a few steps: Open Postman Click on the ' Import ' button in the top left corner. The import window is loaded. Select the import from link option and paste the url of your swagger documentation file. Click on Import. A new collection is generated and available:

Everyone’s opinion is influenced by education, media, earlier experiences, … Do you want to know how biased you are? Try some of the tests on Project Implicit : The Implicit Association Test (IAT)may be especially interesting because it can reveal that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about. More information on https://www.projectimplicit.net/index.html .

All our log data is centralized using a combination of Serilog and Seq . Last week we got a warning that our disks were filling up. We first cleaned up some old log data but than started to look at other ways to decrease our log size. One of the solutions we found was Serilog.Formatting.Compact . From the documentation : A simple, compact JSON-based event format for Serilog. CompactJsonFormatter significantly reduces the byte count of small log events when compared with Serilog's default JsonFormatter , while remaining human-readable. It achieves this through shorter built-in property names, a leaner format, and by excluding redundant information. Seq starting from version 3.3 accepts this more compact format. To use this, configure the sink with compact: true : .WriteTo.Seq("http://localhost:5341", compact: true)

Before our Angular application we first have to load some user profile data before the application can be used. First we used some observable magic to do this in our AppModule but there is a much better way; hook into the Angular initialization process using the APP_INITIALIZER token. Here is a simplified example on how to use it: Some things to notice: You can specify multiple APP_INITIALIZER injection tokens. The factory function should return a function that returns a promise More information: https://hackernoon.com/hook-into-angular-initialization-process-add41a6b7e

2 days ago Microsoft announced Azure DevOps, the new incarnation of VSTS and TFS. Instead of one big mothership, we’ll get 5 smaller vessels that integrate perfectly with each other(of course!) but also with other tools and products. Here are the 5 building blocks: Azure Pipelines CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any Git repository and deploy continuously. Learn More > Azure Boards Powerful work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting. Learn more > Azure Artifacts Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources. Learn more > Azure Repos Unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repos for your project. Collaborative pull requests, advanced file management, and more. Learn more > Azure Test Plans All in one planned and exploratory testing solution. Learn more > More information about the Azure DevOps launch can be found on Channel 9; https://channel9.msd...

When you publish a message through MassTransit to RabbitMQ, a default naming strategy is used to create a corresponding exchange. The default naming convention is the fully qualified name of the message class, so if you have a class named HelloWorldMessage in a namespace MyCompany.Messages.V1, you’ll end up with an exchange named MyCompany.Messages.V1:HelloWorldMessage. This is ok if you are running RabbitMQ locally(through Docker for example), but it gets quite annoying if you are publishing to a shared infrastructure during development. The problem is that you start receiving messages from other developers which makes debugging a lot more difficult. To solve this problem I created a custom EntityNameFormatter that allows you to specify an extra environment setting that can be set to for example to a specific username. Doing this in MassTransit 5 is not that hard as you can set this for the whole MessageTopology(something that was not easily done in previous versions). Here is t...

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 is the RecyclableMemoryStream class. For this one I’m cheating a little bit as it is not part of the .NET Framework directly but released as a separate NuGet package by the Bing team. What is it? Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream is a drop-in MemoryStream replacement with superior behavior for performance-critical systems. In particular it is optimized to do the following: Eliminate Large Object Heap allocations by using pooled buffers Incur far fewer gen 2 GCs, and spend far less time paused due to GC Avoid memory leaks by having a bounded pool size Avoid memory fragmentation Provide excellent debuggability Provide metrics for performance tracking The code looks kinda boring as it uses the same semantics as the built-i...

A few years ago I blogged about enabling gzip compression for ASP.NET MVC applications; https://bartwullems.blogspot.com/2013/03/enable-dynamic-compression-for-aspnet.html .  I ended my blogpost with the following remark: ‘Maybe it should work too if you add this to your web.config, but I couldn’t get this working’ This week I had to configure dynamic compression again, so I decided to search for a solution(again). When scrolling through the applicationHost.config file I noticed the following section: <section name="httpCompression" allowDefinition="AppHostOnly" overrideModeDefault="Deny" /> Notice that there are 2 attributes defined on the httpCompression section; overrideModeDefault and allowDefinition . From the documentation : The overrideModeDefault attribute is an optional attribute that defines the locked state of a section. Its available values are either Allow or Deny. The default value is "Allow". A...

As Visual Studio was getting really slow, I decided to disable Resharper (again). If I really wanted the power of Resharper, I could always open up Rider and continue coding there. After disabling Resharper I noticed that some of my keyboard shortcuts no longer worked. The Resharper functionality was gone but it was not replaced by the Visual Studio keyboard binding. Time to fix it: Open Visual Studio and type ‘keyboard’ in the Quick search Click on Environment –> Keyboard to go to the Visual Studio options Select a Keyboard mapping scheme from the drop down menu and click Reset to activate it.

Until we have record types in C# we’ll have to use classes or structs for our Value objects. What makes this annoying is that we have to override the Equals and GetHashCode methods to get correct equality checks. Until I stumbled over the following blog post by James Montemagno: https://montemagno.com/optimizing-c-struct-equality-with-iequatable/ . In this post he explains how we can use ValueTuples in combination with the new tuple syntax to get cleaner Equals and GetHashCode checks. Here is the code before: Here is the code after introducing ValueTuples:

Code reviews are one of my daily activities. To help me streamline the process, I like to use the help of static code analysis tools like NDepend and SonarQube. While looking through the SonarQube logs for a specific project I noticed a large list of issues in a set of Javascript files. These Javascript files were external libraries (like jQuery) that were imported into the project and not created by the dev team. Fixing these issues would only be possible by sending a pull request to the library maintainers. To stop the pollution of our SonarQube logs, I decided to exclude these files from the log analysis. Here are the steps: Browse to your SonarQube dashboard. Login as an administrator. After being logged in, you can go to the Administration tab on the project level. Select Analysis Scope from the Category list. Go to the Files tab and add one or more Source File Exclusions . In our case we want to exclude the Scripts folder in ou...

After updating Npgsql , Marten started to throw exceptions: [NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.] Marten.Util.TypeMappings.ToDbType(Type type) +93 Marten.Schema.DuplicatedField..ctor(EnumStorage enumStorage, MemberInfo[] memberPath) +141 Marten.Schema.DocumentMapping.DuplicateField(MemberInfo[] members, String pgType, String columnName) +195 Marten.Events.EventQueryMapping.duplicateField(Expression1 property, String columnName) +94 Marten.Events.EventQueryMapping..ctor(StoreOptions storeOptions) +485 Marten.Storage.StorageFeatures.PostProcessConfiguration() +364 Marten.DocumentStore..ctor(StoreOptions options) +259 Marten.DocumentStore.For(Action1 configure) +60 A quick search through the issues list on Github, brought me to the following page: https://github.com/JasperFx/marten/issues/1044 Good news, the issue is already resolved and closed in Marten v3(alpha 2 version is available).