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  • 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)

My Tool List of 2024

After 6 years it is time for an update of my tool list. At first, I thought that there are not that many changes, but after reinstalling my laptop I noticed that there are a few new entries that I would not want to miss.

Do you know a tool that is not on this list and that you find is a must-have? Please leave a comment with a link so that I can try it.

  • in Meta
  • 4 min read

Goodbye 2023, Welcome 2024

We are already in the last week of 2023. This year flew by and so many things happened that I cannot recall all of them. Let us have a look at the highlights of my 2023.

Building with a great opening in the center, Amsterdam Hotel in Zaandam

How to Run a Background Task Inside Your ASP.NET Core Application

We needed a simple solution to run recurring jobs for our user group web site. WebJobs in Azure sounded like the perfect solution, but unfortunately they do not work with App Services on Linux. We needed another approach and we found a much better solution with Background Tasks. All we need to do is to implement the two interfaces IHostedService and IDisposable, and the worker runs outside of the requests to our application.

Serve Test Data From ASP.NET Web API in .Net 8

If you need an API endpoint that gives you some (static) test data, you can join the search for the most complicated solution. My current favourite in unnecessary complexity is to use MongoDB to serve a handful of JSON objects.

However, if you prefer a much lighter approach and already use .Net, I strongly recommend that you try Web API for this task. It only takes a few lines to get your data in a format that you can access from your application. And if you want to keep going on, you can add more functionality with ease.