How to Check if a Website Uses Cloudflare or Not
There is a simple trick to find out if a certain website uses the CDN Cloudflare or not. All we need to do is to add /cdn-cgi/trace at the end of the (sub)domain name:
DevOps
What PowerShell Version Runs on My Computer?
Unlike most other tools, PowerShell does not offer us a -version flag to tell us its version number. There is a -Version flag (with a capital V), but that we need to use a specific version of PowerShell. What can we do to find out what version we run?
A Small Pitfall With the Search in Seq
We use Seq to find valuable insights in the vast sea of our structured log messages. While the search usually works straightforward without any surprises, this time we run into a minor problem.
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.
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.
How to Fix Apt Packages Release File for XY Is Not Valid Yet
As I tried to update my WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) installation, I run into this error message:
Little SQL Server Tricks: Show the Edition of SQL Server
While solving the annoying problem with the *.bacpac files, I was not sure what edition of SQL Server I have installed on my machine. The simplest way to figure out what edition you run is to start SQL Server Management Studio, connect to your SQL Server and right click on the Server node. In the Properties you find an entry for the Product and that shows what edition you use:
How to Clean-up Your Azure DevOps Build Agents
With a higher usage of our build agents in Azure DevOps, we run out of disk space twice in the same week. It was now time to find a solution that would declutter our local build agents.
The last time I searched for a solution I could not find anything that would allow me to clean up the working directory of a build agent without creating a solution by myself. Luckily, Microsoft listened to the countless complaints and created a solution directly in the build agent pool of Azure DevOps.
Little SQL Server Tricks: Include Full-Text Indexes in the Create Table Scripts
SQL Server Management Studio may not include all important parts of your table when you let it write the CREATE TABLE script. For instance, the full-text index for a table is omitted by default. If you use the full-text search feature, you should make sure that SQL Server Management Studio includes them in the create scripts. You can change the behaviour with these steps:
How to Set a Memory Limit for Seq
A while ago we noticed a performance problem with Seq and the other applications that run on the same server. As it turned out, Seq allocated all the memory and left next to nothing for the other applications. A restart of Seq will only be a temporary solution, for a more durable one we need to restrict the memory consumption of Seq. Luckily, we can do that with a simple change in the configuration.