The art of simplicity

While working on updating a (very old) existing .NET application, I noticed the following message in the build output: FastUpToDate: This project has enabled build acceleration, but not all referenced projects produce a reference assembly. Ensure projects producing the following outputs have the 'ProduceReferenceAssembly' MSBuild property set to 'true': 'C:\projects\Example.Data\bin\Debug\netstandard2.0\Example.Data.dll'. See https://aka.ms/vs-build-acceleration for more information. (Example.Business) Build acceleration; that was a topic I had talked about before . It is a feature of Visual Studio that reduces the time required to build projects(as you already could have guessed). Because the mentioned projects where targeting .NET Standard 2.0, some extra work is required to make build acceleration work. Before .NET 5 (including .NET Framework and .NET Standard), you should set ProduceReferenceAssembly to true in order to speed incremental builds. S

Last week I was interviewing a possible new colleague for our team. During the conversation we were talking about database optimization techniques and of course indexing was one of the items on the list. While discussing this topic, the candidate made the following statement: An index doesn’t help when using a LIKE statement in your query. This was not in line with my idea. But he was so convinced that I decided to doublecheck. Hence this blog post… Does a ‘LIKE’ query benefits from having an index? Short answer: YES! The somewhat longer answer: Yes, a LIKE statement can benefit from an index in SQL Server, but its effectiveness depends on how the LIKE pattern is constructed. Let’s explain this with a small example. We created a Products table and an index on the ProductName column. Let’s now try multiple LIKE statement variations: Suffix Wildcard (Efficient Index Usage) This query will benefit from the index because the wildcard is at the end: Prefix Wil

Domain modelling plays a crucial role in the way that I design systems to reflect the business's needs and processes. However, I experienced there is often a disconnect between the idealistic view of domain modelling and the practical reality faced by domain experts. One key issue is that domain experts tend to start from their existing systems rather than describing the 'real' domain. In this post I want to talk about pure domain modelling as a way to overcome the bias that domain experts have when explaining their needs. The domain expert bias When domain experts contribute to domain modelling, they frequently start from the perspective of the existing systems they are familiar with. These systems, whether they are legacy products, databases, or other technological solutions, shape their understanding and descriptions of the domain. While this approach has its advantages, it also introduces several challenges: Bias Towards Existing Systems: Domain experts may de