In a perfect world, no one needs to debug. All code is covered by tests and if something goes wrong, it's just adding yet another test. It's a whole other story in legacy code, where the debugger is your only chance to figure out what is going on. A tool like OzCode will make debugging a whole lot faster.
SQL Server has a great feature called FILESTREAM. It allows applications to store unstructured data (like images or PDF files) on the file system while keeping the transactional capabilities of the database. It's a straight forward task to activate this feature while you install SQL Server. But it gets tricky when you have a pre-installed server.
Let's talk about some of the more annoying habits many programmers have: the inability to delete code. Code is kept around as if their life depends on it, even when its purpose is long gone. They do all possible things so they don't have to delete anything. They comment code out, put unreachable conditions around it or throw files out of a solution (in Visual Studio), just to keep the file in a place where no one is looking. All this is clutter and needs to go away.
Backup and restore are simple tasks in SQL Server. The only problem is the user mapping that may no longer work when you restore the database to a different server. If you try to remap the user, you may end up with an error like this one:
A few days ago I moved my private Git repositories from Bitbucket to GitHub. I expected a manual workflow with a local clone of my old repository, adding then new repository as a remote and then pushing my code to GitHub. While this is possible, GitHub did a great job to make this task much simpler.
Slow network connections and long running scripts aren’t a good combination. The result will often be a timeout, that most likely will not be solved with a retry. When you use DbUp a quick fix for that problem is right around the corner.
Multiple tabs in a web browser are great. If they persist a restart of your browser, you quickly use them as a read-later list. In such a case you don’t want to close the wrong tab. Unfortunately, this happens more often than you want. But there is a simple way to reopen the last closed Tab that works in most browsers.
The /etc/hosts (or hosts file) is a small text file that maps (domain-) names to IP addresses. It's especially helpful when you want to use an easy to remember name for a computer in your home network. Another good reason to use it is for development purposes. With an entry in hosts file you can check if your website works long before the DNS system has distributed the new IP address.
The network attached storage appliances from Synology, called DiskStation, are great backup devices. They come in various sizes and don’t need much maintenance. The only thing that is a bit annoying is the password prompt whenever I use rsync to backup my files. With public key authentication over SSH that problem can be solved without risking the security of my data.
HTTPS for web applications is soon no longer an option, but a must-have. When you develop your application on your local machine, you may want to use a self-signet certificate. They cost you nothing and tools like Visual Studio create them on the first run in IIS Express. Everything would be great if current web browsers wouldn’t show you an error page like this one:
