An often-overlooked combination of tools to develop software are pen and paper. Don't panic, I do not propose to write a first draft of your code on paper and only use a computer for the final version. Some universities or companies in their hiring process may do that, but that is not what I mean.
Last week I did something stupid: While working in the train I decided now would be a good time to upgrade ReSharper to the newest version. It took far longer than expected and when the train reached my station, I had to put my laptop into the sleep mode. As I started it again in the next morning, the ReSharper installation finished and everything looked fine. Except it was not.
When you let SQL Server create the primary keys for a table and try to insert a specific key, you will get this error message:
Cannot insert explicit value for identity column in table 'MyTable' when IDENTITY_INSERT is set to OFF.
A few months ago, my co-worker Lukas run into a problem when he wanted to deploy code with pipelines in Azure DevOps. As a final step, he needed to restart the web server. That is no problem in an interactive session on the machine itself, you just add sudo in front of the command and enter your password. Doing this as part of a pipeline is not a great idea – you would need to write down your password and put it into Azure DevOps.
Sometimes your Git repositories move to another location. You certainly can throw your local copy away and clone it from the new location. However, there is a simpler way that only requires you to update the remote URL and you can continue with your local copy – including all your unpushed changes.
Like all web servers, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) sends its version number with every response:
All of a sudden, our build agent could no longer communicate with Azure. A failed network change forced us to set a proxy server manually. While most browsers use the system proxy, the build agent did not.
It is the time of the year where most new year's resolutions are already forgotten. Should you still want to learn new things I have a great podcast for your. It is not about the shiny new frameworks, instead it will help you to improve your existing applications.
The podcast Legacy Code Rocks! hosted by Andrea Goulet and M. Scott Ford is my favourite one. They know what they are talking about and find guests that have interesting insights to share. I am constantly surprised how much I can learn from every episode and how much of those things can be applied 1:1 to my applications – and that by just spending between 30 and 45 minutes per episode.
2019 was a year full of challenges and I am happy that it is over. I use the time between the holidays to recharge my batteries so that I will be ready to tackle the changes that 2020 will bring.
Some super simple tricks take a long time until you find them. The little trick of this post is probably around since the Windows Operating System got its first graphical user interface. You can browse to a folder in the Windows Explorer and then type cmd into the address bar: