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2024

Standardise, Simplify, Automate – In That Order!

There are not many topics in which success and failure are that close together than in an automation project. It does not matter if you automate a process or code generation – it is a small misstep to turn a possible success into a definitive failure. To change the odds to our favour, we should split our automation project into three distinct phases:

Our process starts with Standardisation, followed by Simplification, and ends with Automation

While everyone has their own ideas what could go into these phases, let us take the time to define them so that we have a common base of understanding.

  • in Meta
  • 1 min read

How to Fix the Mechanical Voices in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word offers us a great feature called “Read Aloud” that I often use to check if I mistakenly wrote a similar but wrong word in my posts.

After installing a new computer, that feature was still there but it sounded awful. Instead of the nice realistic voice I am used to, I got a mechanically sounding robot that butchered the English language. Oh no!

  • in DevOps
  • 1 min read

New Runtime Identifiers to Publish .Net 8 Applications

As long as your application does not use Blazor, upgrading from .Net 7 to .Net 8 is a walk in the park. The only obstacle we run into while upgrading the user group site was the publish task. Microsoft has made some simplifications to the runtime identifiers that are a breaking change.

  • in Methods
  • 4 min read

Straw Men, Straw Men Everywhere!

Maybe it is just my confirmation bias, but I think the number of made-up points to win arguments get out of hand. The points get shallower and more ridiculous with every month, and it seems that there is no end in sight on how low the bar could get.

When it comes to practices and methods, there are enough real shortcomings that one could use for criticism. Instead, we can see one post after another in which people argue about things that you cannot find anywhere in the criticised subjects. Is it straw men hunting season already?

  • in DevOps
  • 2 min read

Manage Your Windows Applications With Winget

If you spend May 2020 focused on other things than tech news, you may have missed the announcement of the Windows Package Manager. It took me a while to find this little gem and noticed that many developers had no clue either that this tool runs on their Windows 10 and 11 machines.

This package manager is not as comprehensive as the ones on Linux. Nevertheless, the number of applications you can manage is impressive and goes way beyond Microsoft products. Let us explore the command line tool winget, that allows us to manage our applications.

Helpful Improvements in NDepend v2023.2

This year marks a decade since I started to use NDepend to assess the quality of .Net projects. NDepend got much better over the years, and as far as I can tell, it is still the most flexible and versatile tool in this space. After using the current version for the last three months, it is about time to give NDepend some space in this blog.

How a Little Environment Variable Can Break Your Integration Tests in ReSharper & Rider

Last week we run into a strange problem with our integration tests. On some developer machines everything worked fine, while other machines got errors like this one:

System.InvalidOperationException : Cannot resolve scoped service 'my.application.IOrderRepository' from root provider. at Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.ServiceLookup.CallSiteValidator.ValidateResolution(Type serviceType, IServiceScope scope, IServiceScope rootScope)