September 9, 2020

An update on MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj

A couple of months ago I first wrote about an open source project that I started called MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj. Since then it has gained some traction and I’m happy to say it is probably the most succesful open source project I’ve launched ever. So I though this would be a good time to give an update on the project and share some of the things that are new. If you’re unfamiliar with the project I recommend reading the announcement blog post first.

March 17, 2020

Introducing MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj

At my current employer, R&R Workforce Management, we’ve done a pretty big investment on Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to manage our database changes. We made that decision when we migrated off of the Oracle database onto SQL Server which is quite a few years back now. At the time it was probably the most mature tool available that allowed us to version control our database changes much like we version controlled all our source code.

February 24, 2020

Building a Pull Request bot with Azure Functions - Part 3 - Operating it

This is the third post in my series on building a pull request bot using Azure Functions. If you haven’t read my previous posts I strongly recommend doing so before diving into this post. Remember that this series is a part of the Applied Cloud Stories initiative. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: How it works Part 3: Operating it In this post I want to give you a feel for how we operate our pull request on a daily basis.

February 10, 2020

Building a Pull Request bot with Azure Functions - Part 2 - How it works

This is the second post in my series on building a pull request bot using Azure Functions. If you haven’t read my first post I strongly recommend doing so before diving into this post. Remember that this series is a part of the Applied Cloud Stories initiative. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: How it works Part 3: Operating it In this post I’ll dive into the details of how the bot actually works, from receiving notifications from Azure DevOps to managing state and posting comments back to the pull request.

February 5, 2020

Building a Pull Request bot with Azure Functions - Part 1 - Introduction

About 2,5 years ago I was talking to my fellow team members about some of their challenges. At the time we had recently switched from TFS Version Control (TFVC) to Git, which obviously introduced quite a few changes in the way we worked. For example, we introduced pull requests as a mandatory step in the development flow in order to increase awareness and code quality. However, we found that some things that would need to happen for every pull request weren’t being done (or not done properly) which weren’t always caught by reviewers either.

November 23, 2018

Porting from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core: Part 3 - Mechanics of porting

This post is part of a series: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Third party dependencies Part 3: Mechanics of porting Part 4: Deployment and packaging options If you haven’t read any of the previous posts I recommend you do this now to get some context that I’ll be referring to in this post. If you have, continue on with the nitty gritty details of porting an app to ASP.

November 7, 2018

Porting from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core: Part 2 - Third party dependencies

This post is part of a series: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Third party dependencies Part 3: Mechanics of porting Part 4: Deployment and packaging options If you haven’t read the first post yet I suggest reading that first since it introduces the app that I’m porting and some of the reasons behind it. Are my dependencies available on .NET Core? Most software these days consists of not just the code we write, but a lot of third party dependencies as well.

November 5, 2018

Porting from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core: Part 1 - Introduction

Last week I took to Twitter and asked if anyone of my followers would be interested in a session about .NET Core for developers that are using .NET Framework today. I wasn’t really expecting all that much by sending that tweet, but with a little help from Immo Landwerth who’s on the .NET team, that tweet seemed to have sparked quite a bit of interest in such a session. Perhaps the announcements that ASP.

November 2, 2018

infosecurity conference

In this post I would like to take a small break from my usual .NET Core related posts and talk about security. That’s because this week was quite a security minded week for me. For example, on Tuesday I attended an internal security bootcamp at Info Support. Security is becoming increasingly important so its also important to increase the awareness of security with everyone involved in software development. But the bootcamp wasn’t the only security related thing I did this week.

June 14, 2018

.NET Core Hackathon 2018

It has been a while since I’ve posted something here on my blog. That’s not because I haven’t done anything, just that I’ve been really busy lately with all kinds of things. For example, I’ve been delving into the container world and delivered a hands-on workshop with Kubernetes on Azure as part of the Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 back in April. That was a lot of fun, since I didn’t know much about Kubernetes before I started working on that, so I learned a lot in a relatively short amount of time, but I digress.

October 29, 2017

Having Fun with the .NET Core Generic Host

As ASP.NET developers we’re fairly used to hosting our code inside Internet Information Services (IIS). However, since ASP.NET Core is cross-platform, hosting inside IIS isn’t always an option. For that reason, the hosting model for ASP.NET Core applications looks quite a bit different. Of course, we can still host our code in IIS, but we also have the option to use Kestrel and run as a standalone application. This new hosting model is visible in code through the WebHostBuilder API from Microsoft.

May 13, 2017

.NET Core and .NET Standard 2.0

This week I’ve attended Microsoft’s Build conference in beautiful Seattle. It has a been a very busy week, but we had a lot of fun attending the different sessions as well as talking to some of the members on the various product teams. Of course, during the week, my focus has been on .NET Core. I’ve attended most (if not all) of the sessions on .NET Core (and related technologies such as ASP.