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2019

How to Upgrade Your Ruby on Rails Application

Ruby on Rails evolves quickly. It may not look like that, but when you go back to your applications, you find them most likely a few versions behind the current stable release. Unfortunately, you cannot simply jump from your current version to the newest one. Instead, you need to upgrade from one major version to the next one (for example: from 4.2.6 to 4.2.11, then to 5.0, 5.1, 5.2). That means the longer you wait, the more work will it take to get to the newest version.

The official Upgrading Ruby on Rails guide explains the required steps in all the details you need to know. However, there are few obstacles I run into that you do not need to repeat.

How to Manage Your Ruby Installation with rbenv

Managing the whole development environment is often a lot of work. You need to get the right tools in the right version and the paths and other environment settings must all be right – or you go on an endless hunt for one problem after another. If you work with Ruby you should look at rbenv. This little helper lets you switch between different versions of Ruby and ensures that everything works as you expect.

How to Improve the Security Headers for Your ASP.NET Application

At the user group meetup last week Damien Bod shared many valuable insights in how to protect your applications. Among the many tools he showed was securityheaders.com. Unfortunately for us, this test site calculated a very bad result for the user group site:

Result of SecurityHeaders.com: F

We took this result as a challenge to improve it quickly and to share what you need to do to improve this rating. Thanks to another tool Damien told us about it only took 10 minutes to get to the B rating.

How to Create an Event Using the Meetup.com API

Meetup.com has a well-documented API that gives you all the information about your events you can think of. Getting the attendees, the pictures taken at your event or the comments is easy, you can even try everything out online without writing a single line of code. That great developer support unfortunately ends rather abruptly when it comes to creating an event using the API. There is no online demo and the documentation itself guides you into the wrong direction.

How to Work with JSON in .Net

Json.NET by Newtonsoft is the de-facto standard when it comes to work with JSON in .Net. The library is very popular, offers great flexibility and is easy to use. Let’s look on what you have to do to serialize and deserialize objects to JSON.

Code Search in Azure DevOps Done Right

The code view in Azure DevOps is a great help: without installing any IDE, you can see the whole code of a project. You can brows through all the files and even make changes directly inside your web browser. The only downside is that you miss a lot of the helpful search options you get in Visual Studio. Luckily for us, the Code Search extension gives us exactly that.