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2020

Lightweight Web Development on Your Local Machine

In the good old days doing web development was a lot simpler. We just open a HTML file from the local filesystem in our browser and the referenced CSS and JavaScript files where loaded as well. We could focus on getting our web site right without the need for a local server or any other infrastructure.

NDC Oslo 2020 - the Online Edition

We all wanted to be in Norway for NDC Oslo 2020, but Covid-19 made that impossible. As with most other conferences in 2020, there was no way to make this an in-person event. The NDC crew and Dylan Beattie did their best to create the typical NDC feeling at an online-only conference. I was surprised how well it worked and how few problems occurred for an event with around 1000 attendees.

Locate an Element Using a CSS Selector in Google Chrome

When you work with Pa11y you may get errors as I described in an earlier blog post:

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Error: This element has insufficient contrast at this conformance level. Expected a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, but text in this element has a contrast ratio of 3.13:1. Recommendation:  change background to #0a8927.
   ├── WCAG2AA.Principle1.Guideline1_4.1_4_3.G18.Fail
   ├── html > body > div > div:nth-child(4) > div:nth-child(1) > div > div:nth-child(2) > a
   └── <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/26287713-johnny-graber" class="btn btn-success">More on Goodreads</a>

Improve the Accessibility of Your Web Application

Last month I attended the NDC Oslo 2020 online workshop Front End Web Fundamentals hosted by Amy Kapernick (@amys_kapers). In my first post on this workshop I wrote about the tools we used and resources that can help you to create better web applications.

Today I focus on accessibility. I am not an accessibility expert, yet the most errors you make are easy to find and do not need much time to fix. It will not replace an accessibility expert when you are required by law to follow certain levels, but it will make their work a lot simpler if the most common mistakes are already fixed.

The main reason to I wrote this post is to remember the different steps I had to take. Your challenges may be different, but if you follow the same structure, you should be able to tackle them as well.

Little SQL Server Tricks: Add New Columns With Default Value and Foreign Key

So far, I used separate statements to add a new column to a table, set a default value and add a foreign key relation to another table. However, we can do these 3 steps in one single command:

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ALTER TABLE [Table Name] ADD
    [New Column Name] [Column Type] 
    CONSTRAINT [Constraint Name Default Value] DEFAULT ([Default Value]) NOT NULL,
    CONSTRAINT [Constraint Name Foreign Key] FOREIGN KEY ([New Column Name]) 
    REFERENCES [Other Table] ([Foreign Id])
  • in DevOps
  • 2 min read

How to Fix Missing NuGet Packages in Azure DevOps

Last week we run into a strange problem with our build server. We use Azure DevOps with a local build machine. Everything worked as expected on Monday, yet on Tuesday without any changes on our part the CI job failed with this problem:

WARNING: Unable to find version '2.7.1' of package 'Serilog'. WARNING: Unable to find version '1.50.5' of package 'Dapper'. ...

Little Git Tricks: Switch to SSH Authentication

Over the last weeks I had a lot of problems with Git credentials in combination with Azure DevOps. Whenever I worked with a repository, my Git client asked for username and password. It got so annoying that I started to switch to SSH authentication and since then that problem never showed up again.

I focus on Azure DevOps in this post, but GitHub offers the same features in a slightly different location.