Blog

February 8, 2022
in Data Storage, DevOps
2 min read

SQL Server and Microsoft Defender: A Slow Combination

We are currently migrating our larger databases to SQL Server 2019. While the migration went smoothly for the small databases, there was an unexpected problem with the last server: the backup was incredibly slow.

The first larger database we moved to the new server took 10 times longer to back up than on the old server (50 minutes instead of 5). If the backup time would proportionally increase with the database size, our biggest database would use the whole maintenance window just for the backup task. We had to fix this problem immediately.

February 1, 2022
in Coding Practice
2 min read

How to Transfer Files From One Synology NAS to Another

Synology builds great NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. For 9 years my DS1512+ worked like a charm. It still works, but since it reached the end of support it is time to move to another device – the DS1618+. The big question I had was how do I move the files from one NAS to the other? As it turns out, there is a surprisingly simple yet robust way to do that.

January 25, 2022
in Coding Practice
2 min read

Visual Studio 2022: An Improved Paste JSON as Classes

Visual Studio 2022 offers so many new features that we easily overlook how existing features have been improved. In today's post, I like to point out how "Paste JSON as Classes" got better and better. Pasting XML or JSON as classes exists since Visual Studio 2017. However, in Visual Studio 2022 you can work with complex object graphs that earlier Visual Studios could not handle.

January 18, 2022
in Coding Practice
1 min read

How To Create a Sequence of Numbers in C

For some problems you need a sequence of numbers. In Python I would use the range() function, while in C# the method Enumerable.Range() gives us what we need. We must specify the starting point and how many numbers we want:

IEnumerable<int> numbers = Enumerable.Range(1, 10);

foreach (int num in numbers)
{
    Console.WriteLine(num);
}

January 11, 2022
in Coding Practice
2 min read

How to Create Issue Templates for GitHub?

GitHub provides a simple issue tracker with a minimalist user interface. While this minimalism is often an advantage, it does not help the user report the important details to reproduce a bug:

The basic interface is simple but lacks guidance

January 4, 2022
in Coding Practice
1 min read

Little Git Tricks: Ignore Everything in a Folder Except a Few Files

With the .gitignore file we can tell Git to ignore certain types of files (like *.exe) or whole folders. All it takes is an entry like this if we want to ignore the folder database:

/database

December 28, 2021
in Meta
3 min read

Go Away 2021, Welcome 2022

A year ago, I had the hope that with the COVID vaccine we are back in something called "normal" by summer. For a few weeks it looked like this could be true before it turned for the worse. While writing this post Switzerland starts the Omicron wave at the high point of our 5th wave (driven by Delta). And yet, as so often in the past two years, the situation around us seams to go unnoticed by the authorities. There is still a strong hybris that we are better and that our measures are sufficient.

December 21, 2021
in DevOps
1 min read

How to Fix Your Remote Desktop Session When the Taskbar Is Gone

A few weeks back I run into an annoying state with my remote desktop connection. All I could see was this:

A blue screen without any Windows controls or Applications.

December 14, 2021
in Coding Practice, DevOps
3 min read

Parting Thoughts on Dev Containers in Docker

Before we conclude this series, let us recapitulate what we learned over the last weeks on dev containers.

December 7, 2021
in Coding Practice, DevOps
4 min read

How to Create a Dev Container for .Net 6

.Net 6 runs on Linux and that allows us to create a dev container without any hassle. Let's look what we need to run a minimalistic API project inside a dev container and connect it to the SQL Server we created last week.