The art of simplicity

When trying to create a Memory Optimized table in SQL Server, I got the following error message: Cannot create memory optimized tables. To create memory optimized tables, the database must have a MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_FILEGROUP that is online and has at least one container. To fix this I first had to add a new memory optimized filegroup to the database: ALTER DATABASE OntSessionTmp ADD FILEGROUP ontsessiontmp_mod CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA After creating the filegroup I had to link a container: ALTER DATABASE ontsessiontmp ADD FILE (name='ontsessiontmp_mod1', filename='F:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL13.ONTINST2\MSSQL\DATA\ontsessiontmp_mod1') TO FILEGROUP ontsessiontmp_mod Now I could switch a table to a Memory Optimized version. Yes!

I’m a big fan of WSL ( Windows Subsystem for Linux ) to test my .NET Core applications on Linux. Recently I tried to install the .NET Core 3.1 SDK on my Ubuntu distribution inside WSL: bawu@ORD02476:~$ sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-3.1 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package dotnet-sdk-3.1 E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'dotnet-sdk-3.1' E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'dotnet-sdk-3.1' This didn’t seem to work. He couldn’t find the .NET Core 3.1 SDK inside the package manager. I first tried to refresh the packages list: bawu@ORD02476:~$ sudo apt update 0% [Connecting to archive.ubuntu.com] [Connecting to security.ubuntu.com] Hit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease [88.7 kB] Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelea...

I’m so spoiled on using TopShelf that I don’t know anymore on how to remove a Windows Service the old fashioned way. If you have Powershell 6 or higher, you can do the following: Remove-Service –name “Your Service Name” An alternative is to directly use the Service Control Manager: sc.exe delete "Your Service Name" Don’t forget the ‘.exe’ when invoking the Service Control Manager inside a Powershell command window. More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/windows-services/how-to-install-and-uninstall-services

While investigating a performance issue we noticed that the we had a lot of RedisTimeoutExceptions inside our logs: 2019-12-15 16:26:57.425 +01:00 [ERR] Connection id "0HLS1E3OEP520", Request id "0HLS1E3OEP520:0000001D": An unhandled exception was thrown by the application. StackExchange.Redis.RedisTimeoutException: Timeout performing PEXPIRE CookiesStorageAuthSessionStore-4a07a1bb-04e0-442d-9223-e1612967bf2b, inst: 2, queue: 8, qu: 0, qs: 8, qc: 0, wr: 0, wq: 0, in: 14411, ar: 0, clientName: SERVER1, serverEndpoint: Unspecified/redis:6379, keyHashSlot: 4822 (Please take a look at this article for some common client-side issues that can cause timeouts: http://stackexchange.github.io/StackExchange.Redis/Timeouts ) You would think that this indicates there is a performance issue in Redis but this turned out not to be the case. Let’s have a second look at the error message and especially the strange parameters: inst: 2, queue: 8, qu: 0, qs: 8, qc: 0, wr: ...

On one of my projects we are using OpenLayers to visualize geographical data. I got stuck when I tried to show markers on a map by using SVG icons. My first attempt looked like this: But on the map I only got a weird black triangle.😕 I tried a lot of alternatives but nothing made any difference. In the end I found out that I could fix it by specifying a size(width and height) inside my SVG file: Remark: Changing the scale and size properties on the style seems to have no affect when using SVG’s. So make sure to set an appropriate size in the SVG file.

By default when you add a web.config file to an ASP.NET Core application, the config file is transformed with the correct processPath and arguments. This can be quite annoying especially if you want to apply some web config transformation magic. Inside the documentation , I found that you can prevent the Web SDK from transforming the web.config file by setting the <IsTransformWebConfigDisabled> property in the project file: This disabled the web config transformation behavior but didn’t solve the problem that Visual Studio updated the web.config file. A colleague sent me another (undocumented?) flag <ANCMPreConfiguredForIIS> : Remark: This setting only works when you are running in IIS InProcess.

As a consultant I’m active at multiple clients. For each of these clients I get a domain account to be able to login onto their systems. But as they all enforce a password policy, I have to update a lot of passwords every month(thank god that password managers exists). Here is a quick tip of you want to change the password of an Active Directory account but your PC isn’t part of the same domain: You can still change your password if your PC is able to talk to the domain controller: Hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE Select Change a Password You’ll see the Change a Password screen where the focus is on the old Password field. But what is not immediately obvious is that you can change the username(and domain!) in the first field. By setting here a different username you can change the password directly for any account you have access to.

While searching something on Github I stumbled over the following repo: https://github.com/Softwarepark/exercises/blob/master/transport-tycoon.md This is a set of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) exercises. They take place in the universe of the Transport Tycoon . It is a game "in which the player acts as an entrepreneur in control of a transport company, and can compete against rival companies to make as much profit as possible by transporting passengers and various goods by road, rail, sea and air." If you want to learn about DDD, or practice your DDD skills this is a great way to start…

While browsing through the ASP.NET Core documentation I noticed the following section: Load session state asynchronously . The default session provider in ASP.NET Core loads session records from the underlying IDistributedCache backing store asynchronously only if the ISession.LoadAsync method is explicitly called before the TryGetValue , Set , or Remove methods. If LoadAsync isn't called first, the underlying session record is loaded synchronously, which can incur a performance penalty at scale. To have apps enforce this pattern, wrap the DistributedSessionStore and DistributedSession implementations with versions that throw an exception if the LoadAsync method isn't called before TryGetValue , Set , or Remove . Register the wrapped versions in the services container. To avoid this performance penalty, I created 2 extensions methods that do a LoadAsync before reading or writing the session state:

.NET Core 3.0 introduced a new WorkerService template that can be used as a starting point for long running service apps. As the worker service template didn’t use a Startup.cs file like in a traditional ASP.NET Core application, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me where I had to configure my IoC container. So a quick tip for my future self, you can do this using the ConfigureContainer() method on the HostBuilder: Remark: The example above is using Autofac but the approach is similar for other containers.

When trying to build a project in Visual Studio, it failed while downloading the nuget packages from our internal Azure Artifacts nuget store. In the logs I could find the following error message: C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\3.0.100\NuGet.targets(123,5): error : Failed to retrieve information about 'Example.WebApi.Client' from remote source 'http://tfs:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/_packaging/892779dc-d854-4c9f-8b26-833d52585ae6/nuget/v3/flat2/example.webapi.client/index.json'. [C:\Projects\MapSU\MapSU.Server.sln] C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\3.0.100\NuGet.targets(123,5): error :   Response status code does not indicate success: 401 (Unauthorized). [C:\Projects\MapSU\MapSU.Server.sln] Directly accessing the Azure Artifacts url worked without a problem, but when I tried to do this through Visual Studio or through the commandline it failed with the error above. I was able to solve the problem by removing the ‘vscredentials’ in the Windows Credentials manager t...

After switching one of our ASP.NET Core applications from out-of-process hosting to InProcess hosting, we got the following error message: This is caused by the fact that we are running multiple applications in IIS in the same application pool. As long as we were running out-of-process this was not an issue. But when we switched to InProcess hosting it turned out that you cannot run multiple In-Process applications in the same application pool. The solution is simple, give each application its own app pool.

The people from InfoQ released a free (mini)book about .NET Core . In this book, five authors talk about the current state of .NET Core 3.0 from multiple perspectives. Each author brings their experience and ideas on how different .NET Core 3.0 features are relevant to the .NET ecosystem, both present and future. It covers the following topics: Navigating the .NET Ecosystem - In 2002, .NET was released. Over the next 12+ years, the .NET developer community patiently grew at a seemingly steady pace. Then, things started evolving rapidly. Microsoft anticipated the changing ecosystem and embraced the open-source development mindset, even acquiring GitHub. Interview with Scott Hunter on .NET Core 3.0 - Chris Woodruff talks to Director of Program Management for the .NET platform Scott Hunter about what developers can expect from .NET Core 3. Single Page Applications and ASP.NET Core 3.0 - Web development has changed in the past few years, with the maturity of Angular, Re...

Did you know it is really easy to find out which tables in SQL Server use the most disk space? Open SQL Server Management Studio Right click on your database Go to Reports –> Standard Reports Choose the Disk Usage by Table report:

In ASP.NET Core you can implement the IClaimsTransformation interface. This allows you to extend/change the incoming claimsprincipal: Unfortunately my ClaimsTransformer was never invoked when I used Windows Authentication in IIS. The trick was to explicitly specify the IISServerDefaults.AuthenticationScheme:

While updating my docker-compose file   to the latest docker images, I noticed I had to set some extra values before I could run my ELK cluster: I had to add an extra bootstrap check: - "bootstrap.memory_lock=true" and set the memlock ulimits: ulimits:     memlock:         soft: -1         hard: –1 The memory lock setting will disable swapping out parts of the JVM heap to disk. Memory swapping is bad for performance and node stability so it should be avoided at all cost. More information: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/setup-configuration-memory.html The memlock soft and hard values configures the range of memory that ElasticSearch will use. Setting this to –1 means unlimited.

To publish a .NET Core application using Web Deploy, you can use the .NET Core Task inside Azure pipelines. Through the .NET Core Task you can invoke the dotnet CLI and invoke the available commands. To use Web Deploy you can use the ‘Publish’ command. It took me some time to find the correct arguments, so here they are in case you need it: dotnet publish --configuration $(BuildConfiguration) /p:PublishProfile=$(BuildConfiguration) /p:Password=$(WebDeployPassword) /p:Username=$(WebDeployUser) /p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True Remark: Don’t forget to first create a PublishProfile(pubxml) file in Visual Studio and commit it to your repo. Git ignored my pubxml by default and it took me some time to figure out why nothing happened…

I find code consistency really important. This removes a lot of mental burden from the developer. One of the conventions that is quite common in C#is to use camelCase for local variables and _camelCase for private or internal fields. An example: Unfortunately this convention is not automatically enforced by Visual Studio. To fix this you can add an editorconfig file with the following rules: dotnet_naming_rule.instance_fields_should_be_camel_case.severity = suggestion dotnet_naming_rule.instance_fields_should_be_camel_case.symbols = instance_fields dotnet_naming_rule.instance_fields_should_be_camel_case.style = instance_field_style   dotnet_naming_symbols.instance_fields.applicable_kinds = field   dotnet_naming_style.instance_field_style.capitalization = camel_case dotnet_naming_style.instance_field_style.required_prefix = _