Azure DevOps allows you to add multiple Git repositories to the same project. That allows you to set the permissions only once and organise your code as you like. Sooner than later, you try to add a second backlog and that is where things get complicated. This feature is well hidden and easy to overlook.
The more complex an application becomes, the greater is the benefit of Docker. If everything runs in containers, we can use a tool like docker-compose and start all the parts with one single command. No need to install all the tools, services, and frameworks - just run docker-compose and the magic happens automatically. We can go from nothing to the full running application in a few minutes.
Since I saw the talk "Dev and Test Agility for your Database with Docker" by Julie Lerman at NDC Oslo 2019 I wanted to port her solution for .Net Core to the .Net Full Framework. How hard could it be? As it turns out, it is an awful lot of work and a few weeks ago Microsoft made it even harder.
At the spring cleaning of my computers, I noticed that one device I had nearly no disk space left. After removing old files and the usual suspects (like Windows updates) I found that Docker uses the most space.
While Docker Desktop for Windows showed me a disk usage of around 50 GB, TreeSize found 124 GB - far too much for the few containers that run on this machine. To clean-up the storage, I first tried the prune command to remove unused data:
If you commit a file to a Git repository, it stays there forever. Even when you remove it, Git keeps it around in the .git folder – otherwise you could not go back to a version where this file was part of your project.
SQL Server offers an integrated alarming system that informs you by email when something goes wrong. In the past this helped us find problems early on and react quickly – before we lost data. Let us look how we can activate this feature in SQL Server.
After the installation and the enforced reboot of my machine, Docker Desktop for Windows did not bother to start. I got the Docker command line application in the Command Prompt, but the hello-world example ended with an error:
One problem that annoyed me for months was the missing code coverage in our build jobs in Azure DevOps. The metric vanished from one day to another for the .Net 4.x projects. Whatever I tried with the options in the Visual Studio Test task, all I could produce was this link to the Microsoft documentation:
With your StyleCop installation done and your custom configuration in place, you are now ready to clean-up your project. This is part three of my small series of StyleCop for .Net 5 Projects:
With your StyleCop installation in place we can now look at how we can customise our StyleCop configuration.
When you work in a team it is of great importance that you all follow the same rules. Otherwise your turn a code base in a mess in no time. We settled for StyleCop because it allowed us to delegate the nitpicking of code formatting and code style to a tool that does it automatically at development time. That allows us to use the time in code reviews for the important parts.