Together with .Net 9 we got a new Visual Studio version. Not a Visual Studio 2025 or something that signals the significance of the version change. No, we got the small step of 17.11 to 17.12 and may give not much notice to all the changes – and they are big.
By default, dotnet runs the newest version that it finds on our machine. While most of the time that is not a problem, it looks a bit different when a new version of .Net is out. Then we may not yet be ready to upgrade and wish to use the older .Net version. But how can we do that?
As with many other websites these days, the number of page views for this blog has plummeted. The lower the numbers are, the more important it would be for the statistics tool to report the correct numbers. Unfortunately, Jetpack Stats is not up to the task. After collecting data for the last 12 months, I concluded that Jetpack misses up to 30% of the page views.
While adding a new step to our data synchronisation, I run into this error message from SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS):
Column "MyColumn" cannot convert between Unicode and non-Unicode string data types.
A new installation of Windows 11, a new challenge to overcome. This time the installation started without a problem, but later on it could not find any internet connection. Neither the ethernet cable nor the wireless network worked because Windows did not install any drivers for the network adapters.
After updating the SonarQube tasks in our Azure DevOps pipeline, we got this error message:
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/sonarsource/scanner/cli/Main has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 61.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 57.0
When we run our ASP.NET application from the command line, we see that it only starts the HTTP port:
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[14] Now listening on: https://localhost:5155 info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0] Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down. info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0] Hosting environment: Development info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0] Content root path: C:\Users\jg\source\repos\WebApplication1\WebApplication1
Many tasks for Octopus Deploy in Azure DevOps work asynchronously. What is great in fire-and-forget scenarios, can be a problem when we need to finish a task before we go to the next one.
We had many failing BDD tests right at the beginning of the test run. After a long and cumbersome debugging session, we found the source of the problem: Our tests started before Octopus deployed our release to the server. But how can we delay our pipeline enough until Octopus finishes its work?
For the last few weeks, I got this annoying behaviour in the Windows task manager: When I started it and went to the performance tab, it showed the current system load and then it stops. The screen freezes and the values are no longer updated.
I had a query where I had to find the larger of two values. The MAX() function may sound like the thing you could use, but that function only works with aggregates and GROUP BY. I had to search for an alternative and found the IIF function.