Keeping your database up-to-date with your code is an important task. There are many different approaches and even more tools to support you. However, they often come with a price you may not be willing to pay.
A different way goes DbUp. This little tool helps you to update your database in a simple, understandable manner. It can’t do everything, but what it can works great. Let’s have a deeper look at DbUp.
I'm still new to the world of Node.js, Bower and Gulp. When I run into an error I often don’t know if it was my fault or if the environment is in shambles. A few days ago I was facing this error message, which turned a simple rebuild of the application into a journey into the depths of the environment:
This summer I could finally catch up with many podcasts I wanted to listen to. To hear different perspectives is a great opportunity to rethink what you are doing and discover new possibilities. One of the new discoveries I made is the CodeNewbie podcast by Saron Yitbarek.
The NDC 2015 in Oslo was once more a blast. Two days of pre-conference workshops followed by 3 days of a content-packed conference with up to 10 parallel tracks resulted in an incredible learning opportunity. This year more than 1'900 attendees from over 50 countries attended a well-organized conference and turned it in a great event.
Visual Studio Online is a great service for developers. Not only do you get a whole Team Foundation Server for free, you also get a place to host your private Git repositories. As long as you use Visual Studio everything works as expected. However, that changes in the moment you try to use any other client (including GitHub for Windows). All you get with those clients is an authentication failure.
Working in the flow feels great. You are fully immersed and can spend hours focused on one single goal. However, it’s not that easy to get into this state of mind. Some use a form of meditation techniques, other listen to music. The later one sometimes worked for me, but most of the time it’s more a distraction. The songs that are fun to listen to often don’t improve the ability to solve complex problems.
I use the service of Travis-CI now for a year. In that time the continuous integration has often pointed out problems I never had on my machine and let me quickly fix them, while I still know what the last change was about. If you don’t already use a service like Travis-CI you definitely should go and activate it. Here are 5 points on why this is a good decision.
In exploratory testing one tries to figure out how well the system under test reacts to edge cases and special input data. It’s less structured than acceptance or unit tests and therefore may help you find different kinds of problems. Good input data is not all it takes, but it can help you a lot. When you prefer to use your time to test instead of cultivating the necessary data, then you should try Bug Magnet.
For all the examples I showed you so far I wrote the configuration for Serilog directly in the code. That worked very well and only took a few lines of calls to the fluent API. This approach is great for a demo or a simple little application that doesn't need to change.
In a more realistic setting your production is separated from your test environment. Not only are the servers different, but you need a different configuration as well. But changing the configuration in this case means recompile your application. A better way is the topic of today’s post.