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  • in DevOps
  • 2 min read

The Mysterious Performance Problem of an Azure DevOps Build Agent

Last week I run into the strangest problem with Azure DevOps since we started using it in 2015. From one day to the next, one of our local build servers took massively more time to do its work. Build steps that took 30 seconds now run for 10 minutes, some even for more than an hour.

Nothing had changed in the application or in our environment, but now we had an unusable situation. I first checked status.dev.azure.com to see if there was a known problem. All services where up and running, no news on Twitter and Google only showed problems like mine from years ago.

Little SQL Server Tricks: Increase the Font Size in the Result Grid of SSMS

The SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has a simple way to increase the font size of your query. (You can select a value between 20% and 400% in the bottom of that window). But when you try to increase the font size in the result grid, you find nothing. We always have to guess what it says when we share our screens in a Teams meeting. Luckily, someone in my team found the way to fix that problem.

Lightweight Web Development on Your Local Machine

In the good old days doing web development was a lot simpler. We just open a HTML file from the local filesystem in our browser and the referenced CSS and JavaScript files where loaded as well. We could focus on getting our web site right without the need for a local server or any other infrastructure.

NDC Oslo 2020 - the Online Edition

We all wanted to be in Norway for NDC Oslo 2020, but Covid-19 made that impossible. As with most other conferences in 2020, there was no way to make this an in-person event. The NDC crew and Dylan Beattie did their best to create the typical NDC feeling at an online-only conference. I was surprised how well it worked and how few problems occurred for an event with around 1000 attendees.