Visual Studio has an old but still helpful way to change your web.config file based on the environment or build mode. This allows you to replace connection strings or the configuration for web services without the need to fiddle with XML. You still need to write XML Transformation code, but that is a lot simpler than modifying everything on your own.
Creating links between web pages is the foundation of the world wide web. You can do that with the HTML a tag and the href attribute. The default behaviour of a web browser is to bring you on the top of that linked page. While this works for most cases, sometimes you want to link to a more specific part. There is a simple solution to improve the user experience if you can modify the linked page.
I try to keep my build jobs free from warnings. Otherwise they tend to grow rapidly, and it gets impossible to notice upcoming problems early on. From time to time a build job throws a warning message like this one:
I use GitHub Desktop since it was called GitHub for Windows. In those 8 years I never had problems with this Git client – at least until a few days ago where nothing worked at all.
It started as I tried to push to one of my Git repositories at GitHub. Instead of synchronising my changes, GitHub Desktop asked if I want to create a remote repository. I expected that my login token was no longer valid. Therefore, I signed out and logged in to get a new one. That did not change anything. I put this problem aside and tried to clone another one of my repositories. However, the list of my GitHub repositories was empty.
Last week I run into the strangest problem with Azure DevOps since we started using it in 2015. From one day to the next, one of our local build servers took massively more time to do its work. Build steps that took 30 seconds now run for 10 minutes, some even for more than an hour.
Nothing had changed in the application or in our environment, but now we had an unusable situation. I first checked status.dev.azure.com to see if there was a known problem. All services where up and running, no news on Twitter and Google only showed problems like mine from years ago.
The installer of SQL Server has a little annoyance: By default, the available memory for your database is set to 2147483647 (or Int32.MaxValue) :
Creating a client-side SSL certificate that you can use to log in on a web site is a challenge. Every part from your certificate to the settings in your web application must work together or you only get an error message. You may have created SSL server certificates without any problems, but believe me, client certificates are another beast.
Visual Studio 2019 has an annoying behaviour when it comes to extensions. By default, they are not directly accessible in the menu bar, they are hidden in the Extensions menu:
The SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has a simple way to increase the font size of your query. (You can select a value between 20% and 400% in the bottom of that window). But when you try to increase the font size in the result grid, you find nothing. We always have to guess what it says when we share our screens in a Teams meeting. Luckily, someone in my team found the way to fix that problem.
We use StyleCopAnalyzers (the successor of the StyleCop package) to get consistent code in all our projects. While it is sometimes annoying, it is the simplest way we found to enforce code style guidelines. Since we use it in all our projects, we want to reuse our customised ruleset.