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How to Overcome the Annoying Obstacles with Let’s Encrypt on Azure

Let's Encrypt offers free SSL certificates to protect the traffic between your website and the visitors. They are as good as the expensive commercial ones, but they need to be renewed every three months - thanks to automation, this is not a problem.

I use Let’s Encrypt for all my sites and never had any problems. A few clicks on the management interface of Plesk and all the traffic went over HTTPS – and the renewal just worked out of the box. With that experience I thought that using Let’s Encrypt on Azure should be no challenge at all. How wrong I was.

Use the AdventureWorks Sample Database for Your Examples

Whenever I want to explain something that requires a database, I have to spend a lot of time to create the tables and test data before I even can start with the part I want to show. The more time I spend with the setup, the less time I have to write the blog posts. However, most examples do not require handcrafted tables. They would work with any table, as long as there is just enough test data.

Comparing Lists with LINQ & LINQPad

Many of my tasks around data quality control involve lists and the question "Which Id’s are in list A but not in list B?". I tried to use Excel for this task but failed more often than I can count. As the next batch of checks rolled in, I had enough and tried a new approach using LINQ and the little tool LINQPad. This time it only took 20 lines of code and I could create a solution similar to that what I would write in SQL.

How a Stupid Mistake Resulted in a System.TypeLoadException

A few weeks ago, I had a rather strange problem. Between two meetings I thought I could quickly write a little code example. While it compiled without error, I got this exception when I tried to run in:

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'MetadataExtractor.ImageMetadataReader' from assembly 'MetaDataExtractor, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'. at MetaDataExtractor.Program.Main(String[] args)

Starting Multiple Projects at Once in Visual Studio

Visual Studio offers a simple way to change the project that gets started when you click on Start or hit F5. All you need to do is to select the project in the Solution Explorer, right-click on the name and select the option "Set as StartUp Project":

Set as startup project in the solution level

This works well when you want to start just one project in a solution. Starting multiple projects at the same time needs a different approach and this post shows you two options you can use.

Your own Workflow in Azure DevOps

For a long time your workflow customization inside Azure DevOps was limited to choosing one of the pre-defined process templates. All other forms of customization you could do with the on-premises installation of TFS where not possible in Azure DevOps (or Visual Studio Team Services for those who are more familiar with the old name).

This limitation is now history and you can modify your workflow as much as you like. However, without a backup solution for your work items this task can end in a terrible mess. Before you change anything, at least connect with Visual Studio to your work items and export everything to an Excel sheet.