Last week we run into a strange problem with our build server. We use Azure DevOps with a local build machine. Everything worked as expected on Monday, yet on Tuesday without any changes on our part the CI job failed with this problem:
WARNING: Unable to find version '2.7.1' of package 'Serilog'. WARNING: Unable to find version '1.50.5' of package 'Dapper'. ...
Last week I attended the NDC Oslo 2020 online workshop Front End Web Fundamentals hosted by Amy Kapernick (@amys_kapers). She is a front end developer and speaks at conferences from NDC to Microsoft Build. If you want to learn about HTML and CSS, you should read her blog (and attend her workshop).
Over the last weeks I had a lot of problems with Git credentials in combination with Azure DevOps. Whenever I worked with a repository, my Git client asked for username and password. It got so annoying that I started to switch to SSH authentication and since then that problem never showed up again.
I focus on Azure DevOps in this post, but GitHub offers the same features in a slightly different location.
A few days ago, I tried to update my side-projects to .Net 4.8. With most projects this worked without any problems. But in the middle of the upgrade I got this strange error message:
Running your database with a case-insensitive collation is often a great help. If you search for 'de' you find 'de', 'De', 'dE' and 'DE' as well. However, if you need to make a case-sensitive search, that benefit is now a liability and all the other cases clutter your result.
As explained in my earlier post, Visual Studio creates a self-signed certificate for your web application that allows you to access your site over HTTPS. If you accidentally remove this certificate, your web application will fail to load and report something like ERR_CONNECTION_RESET on the default error page of your browser:
We use Selenium and Firefox to verify our BDD specifications. That combination worked well until the last update to Firefox 75. Instead of our application on the developer machine, Firefox only showed us the "Your connection is not secure error" overlay. We depend on fast feedback cycles and needed a solution quickly.
Visual Studio creates a self-signed certificate for your web application that allows you to access your site over HTTPS. As long as you do not need to change anything, this magical configuration works like a charm. Unfortunately, when you need to change something, it is incredibly hard and the magic turns into a curse.
If you want to span a row over multiple columns in an HTML table, you can use the colspan attribute on the td element. You may know the approach in which you specify the number of columns you want to span. A much simpler way to span all columns is to use 100%:
Getting parts of a string is usually a job for SUBSTRING. However, when you only care about the last two characters of a string, save yourself the troubles of calculating the starting point for the SUBSTRING function. A much simpler approach is to use the RIGHT function: