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Migrating the User Group Data – Part 1: Extraction

The website of the .Net User Group Bern worked without much change for nearly 10 years. A refresh was necessary and that gave us two options: Just use a shiny new design or use it as an opportunity to learn new skills and interesting technology. We went with the later one and one of the learning opportunities I picked was the migration of all the data. Our small data set is great to try out different approaches and I hope my post can help you with much bigger migrations as well.

How to Use Security Tokens with Azure DevOps

Over the last weeks I run in to constant login problems with my Git repositories hosted in Azure DevOps. One day everything works, the next day I cannot connect. I seems as if Microsoft is pushing more actively the move to personal access tokens and the older approach with alternate credentials comes to an end. Those tokens offer more flexibility and you can create them in just a few simple steps.

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.