The art of simplicity

I created a small console application that automatically adds the application pool users on your local IIS server to the correct groups on the web server so that performance counter data is correctly send to Application Insights. You can find some extra content, the original announcement and the source code here: Azure Application Insights– Collect Performance counters data (bartwullems.blogspot.com) Azure Application Insights–Collect Performance Counters data - Part II (bartwullems.blogspot.com) wullemsb/AppInsightsPoolTool: Allows to automatically add AppPool users to the correct groups for Application Insights (github.com) So what is the reason for this post? When you publish the tool, it resulted in a combination of an exe and multiple DLL’s: This means that you need to copy all these files to be able to run the tool. It would be nice if there was only a single executable. Let’s see how to get this done… Switch to single file publish Open up the csproj f...

As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts. Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XIII -  API integration Part XIV – Bring your own API Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API Part XVI – Distributed Functions Part XVII – Data API Builder Part XVIII -  Deploy using Bicep Part XIX – Introducing the SWA CLI Part XX(this post) – SWA CLI behind the s...

As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts. Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XIII -  API integration Part XIV – Bring your own API Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API Part XVI – Distributed Functions Part XVII – Data API Builder Part XVIII -  Deploy using Bicep Part XIX(this post) – Introducing the SWA CLI Today I want to introduce you a...

I already showed in a previous post how you could integrate Semantic Kernel with the .NET Core LoggerFactory to see what is going on while interacting with your OpenAI backend. Here is the link in case you missed it: Debugging Semantic Kernel in C# (bartwullems.blogspot.com) . An even better solution is to use the OpenTelemetry integration. Therefore we need to create a LoggerFactory instance that uses OpenTelemetry as a logging provider: Now we need to register this LoggerFactory as a service of the Semantic Kernel builder: If we now take a look at our Aspire Dashboard , we could see the logged messages appear: It is also possible to collect any related metrics and traces. Therefore add the following code to your Program.cs : If we now take a look at the Aspire Dashboard, we can see both the metrics and the end-2-end trace:

If you are new to Semantic Kernel , I would point you to one of my earlier posts. In this post I want to show how you can change the timeout values when using Semantic Kernel. The power of Semantic Kernel is that it gives you the ability to interact with multiple (large language) models in an uniform way. You interact using C#, Java or Python with the Semantic Kernel SDK and behind the scenes it will do the necessary API calls to OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Hugging Face or  a local OpenAI compatible tool like Ollama . Of course as we are interacting with an API behind the scenes, it can happen that the API doesn’t return any results in time and that we get a timeout exception. The operation was cancelled because it exceeded the configured timeout. Let me share how I fixed it… Use a custom HttpClient One option you have is to explicitly pass an HttpClient instance when creating the Semantic Kernel instance: Retry when a timeout happens If the timeout typically happen...

T o avoid carrying around multiple laptops for different customers I typically ask if they can provide me a VDI (for example through Azure Virtual Desktop). One of my clients is not on a cloud platform (yet), so the VM they provided me was running on a local(read: in a traditional datacenter) hyper-v cluster. As we were investigating to move to a container based development model, I installed Podman Desktop on the provided machine. Podman Desktop requires a Podman machine to be created to be able to run workloads. However when I tried to create a new machine, it failed with the following error message: Error: the WSL import of guest OS failed: exit status 0xffffffff I did a second attempt through the commandline but this failed as well: podman machine init Extracting compressed file: podman-machine-default-amd64: done Importing operating system into WSL (this may take a few minutes on a new WSL install)... WSL2 is not supported with your current machine configuration. Pl...

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you've certainly seen my earlier post on how to integrate Application Insights telemetry in your HotChocolate based GraphQL backend. IMPORTANT: Although the code below will still work, I would recommend to switch to the integrated OpenTelemetry functionality and send the information to Application Insights in this way. Today I had to upgrade an application to HotChocolate 13 and (again) I noticed that the application no longer compiled. So for people who are using the ApplicationInsightsDiagnosticsListener I shared, here is an updated version that works for HotChocolate 13: As I wanted to track the full operation I have overwritten the ExecuteRequest method, however if you only want to log any exception, I would recommend to override the RequestError and ResolverError methods: More information HotChocolate OpenTelemetry (bartwullems.blogspot.com) GraphQL HotChocolate 11 - Updated Application Insights monitoring (bartwullem...

About 2 years ago I blogged about the possibility to collect performance counter data as part of your Application Insights telemetry. If you missed the original post, first have a quick read here and then come back. Back? As mentioned in the original post, to be able to collect this performance data, the Application Pool user needs to be added to both the Performance Monitor Users and Performance Log Users group. Although I updated our internal wiki to emphasize this, I still noticed that most developers forget to do this with no collected data as a result. (Who reads documentation anyway?) So let’s do what any developers does in this case, let’s automate the problem away… I created a small tool that can be executed on the IIS web server. It goes through all the application pools, extracts the corresponding user and add it to the 2 groups as mentioned above. I think the code is quite self-explanatory. Here is the part where I read out the application pools: And here I ad...

A short post today; a colleague wanted to investigate a production issue when sending and receiving messages using MassTransit. He couldn’t find immediately how to change to capture more details about the MassTransit internals. I had a look together with him. So for further reference you can find the answer here. Using Serilog On this specific project he was using Serilog so let me first show you how to change the log level for MassTransit when using Serilog: Using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging And here is the code changes required when using the default Microsoft.Extensions.Logging: Remark: I would certainly recommend to have a look at the observability features of MassTransit as well and look to implement OpenTelemetry in your application. More information Logging · MassTransit Observability · MassTransit

On one of my pet projects I’m using ImageSharp to manipulate images. It is a great library that comes with a lot of features in it. And performance and memory usage is good which is quite important when manipulating images.  Remark: Be aware that a commercial license is needed in some conditions. So check out the pricing page before adding this library to your application. I decided to add some new stuff but before I did that I updated the library to the latest version. However after doing that my original code no longer compiled. Let’s see how we can fix this… Here is the original code: This specific overload no longer exists in the latest version. So I started to update my code to a supported overload: Remark: Notice that I also switched to an async overload but know that a synchronous version exists as well. However by doing that I no longer had the format information available. The good news is that this information could now be accessed through the image.Meta...

Yesterday I had the pleasure to present at Code & Comedy 2024 . Again it was a great combination of inspiring sessions, great food and a lot of nice people to meet. All of this followed by a Comedy Act by Jan Jaap van der Wal. I never thought that AI could be that much fun! Note to myself: Next time make sure that I’m not one of the 2 Flemish guys in the room. I did a presentation titled " This session will give you 2,6h a day of your time back!"; which is a hard promise to make, so I hope that the participants could confirm if I succeeded or not. In the session I shared some surprising insights in behavioral science and explained how we can apply this knowledge in building AI assistants. In case you missed my session or you want to a look at the code in more detail, here are the relevant links: Presentation: wullemsb/presentations: Repo with all my (public) presentations (github.com) Source code: wullemsb/SemanticKernel: Demo code for my AI session (githu...

After upgrading my Visual Studio to 17.10.2, I got a warning that my Github Copilot and Github Copilot Chat extensions are incompatible with my Visual Studio version and will be disabled. The following extensions are disabled because the installed version if not compatible with Visual Studio Pro 17.10.34505.107. - GitHub Copilot - GitHub Copilot Chat I started to get a small panic because once you are used to have a Copilot assistant you never want to go back. So after my Visual Studio was up and running, I opened the extension window and indeed both extensions were disabled: I first tried to reinstall the extension but I got the same incompatibility message. Does this mean that I can no longer use Copilot? Luckily the answer is no.  Starting from Visual Studio 17.10.2 Github Copilot and Copilot Chat are no longer separate extensions but became part of Visual Studio. So although the extensions are no longer there, Copilot (Chat) was still available as I found out. A b...

One of our production servers started to send out alerts because the memory consumption was too high. A first look at the server showed us that one of the w3wp processes was consuming most of the available resources on the server.   Sidenote: Web applications running within Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) utilize what is known as IIS worker processes. These worker processes run as w3wp.exe, and there are typically multiple per server. So we knew that one of our web applications was causing trouble. The question of course now is which one? As the resource manager only showed us the process id, we couldn’t immediately give the answer. But with some extra command line magic we got the answer. To get the information we need we used the appcmd utility. This tool allows; among other things; to list the IIS worker processes. We executed appcmd list wps and got the the list of worker processes with their PIDs. c:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd list wps ...

Being a software architect, I'm always looking for good resources that can help me design better solutions. One of these resources I can recommend are the Solution Patterns from Red Hat . Although mainly focused on Red Hat technologies, most of the described patterns are applicable in a broader context. For every solution pattern, you get more information about the problems it tackles and uses cases it solves, a reference architecture and a technical implementation. For example, let’s have a look at API versioning . As you can see you get some use cases where API versioning plays a role: And a high level solution: If you want to further drill down in the details, you can have an in-depth look at the solution’s architecture. With all this information you can make an informed decision if this solution pattern could help you in solving your specific needs. So bookmark this link and go explore the other solution patterns . More information Solution Patterns from Red H...

After upgrading a SonarQube server at one of my clients, we encountered some issues. In this post I'll walk you through each problem we experienced and how we solved it. Let’s start! java.lang.IllegalStateException: Fail to connect to database Our first exception doesn’t tell that much. So let’s have a look at the logs: 2024.05.10 10:43:33 INFO  web[][o.s.p.ProcessEntryPoint] Starting Web Server 2024.05.10 10:43:33 INFO  web[][o.s.s.a.TomcatHttpConnectorFactory] Starting Tomcat on port 9000 2024.05.10 10:43:35 INFO  web[][o.s.s.p.LogServerVersion] SonarQube Server / 10.5.1.90531 / a69dd88808638ec33015277e236bca319314ce8b 2024.05.10 10:43:35 INFO  web[][o.s.d.DefaultDatabase] Create JDBC data source for jdbc:sqlserver://server:1433;databaseName=Tfs_Sonar;integratedSecurity=true 2024.05.10 10:43:35 INFO  web[][c.z.h.HikariDataSource] HikariPool-1 - Starting... 2024.05.10 10:43:37 WARN  web[][o.s.c.a.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext] Except...