Developer

Videos posted in Febuary to YouTube

.

Videos posted in October to YouTube

Videos posted in September to YouTube

Videos posted in August to YouTube

JsonConverter that works with System.Text.Json allows having a string property that will just store the json element string instead of trying to parse the properties into a complex object

Whenever you take out an Azure VM you generally get a single disk which is not that big, when you select a SQL Server based VM (even web edition) you automatically get a 1TB disk, if you are using managed disks you pay for that whole TB even if you are only using 1GB of it. This post will show you how you can lower the price of that virtual machine if you are in this situation

Recently talking to people it's obvious that a lot of people are either not following what is going on globally and in lots of cases have information that seems to have been obtained from unreliable sources

MyBroadband released a post titled "New rules for all co.za websites and ISPs during coronavirus outbreak" which mentioned that ISPs needed a visible link to one of the South African information sites for corona virus so thought it would be a useful thing for more people to add banners in general to their sites linking to a trusted source for corona virus information

Every time I create a new project using Azure Web Apps or even IIS and I need to add a pfx file for end to end https, Cloudflare gives you a private key and certificate but you can't use those directly with Azure Web Apps and I keep forgetting how to do this exactly so as I do sometimes I'm going to post the steps so that it's helpful to others as well as future me.

Have a site sitting in GitHub that you currently maybe manually deploy to Azure or use some other tool? Why not use GitHub Actions to quickly and easily publish to Azure. I was pushing a small site (Guid.Empty) to Azure through GitHub and decided to document the couple steps for future me 😋... oh and for you of course 😅

Organizations often put a lot of effort around testing their products, they'll put tons of effort in unit testing, integration testing across their UI and API layers but sometimes have a strategy of covering everything. This doesn't always add value to their pipelines because the metric that is being chased is not value which agreeably is a hard thing to measure but rather it's a coverage metric.

To start with I don't know if testing strategy is what was happening for TicTocTrack but is something that is definitely highlighted as something that would have been valuable for them. A security vulnerability discovered around a year ago from a fellow MVP and security expert Troy Hunt was patched and then earlier this year I re-discovered it

Did you know that you can get a list of all organizations linked to your Azure Active Directory tenant? Since august this has been possible 😁

If you don’t know yet what GitHub actions are you can read about it on the GitHub Actions feature on GitHub. In short on the 8th of August GitHub announced an update to their actions which you can read about in this blog post. it’s a very easy way to automate anything from any event in GitHub.

So something that you've probably noticed when using dev tools in the web and Visual Studio Code is that you can hit ctrl + enter and with this you may have noticed that in Visual Studio you can't do that. Below you'll see how you can add this to your IDE.

So watching this weeks asp.net community standup ASP.NET Community Standup - December 11, 2018 - 2.2 Release Party! and Scott Hanselman shows how to make a dashboard for your application insights resource in no time.

#TYMHKON: What is it?

A while back I created a service linked to Twitter that tweets when your pipeline has completed in Azure Pipelines. This post is going to show you how you can easily tweet when your builds complete .

#TYMHKON: What is it?

TYMHKON is something random that to me looks like it could be Japanese? Not sure what makes me think that when seeing it but what it really stands for is Things You May Have Known Or Not!

I've generally built libraries wrong by placing all binaries in the root and it's worked ok for now so why change it. I might also add that these libraries have been for internal use so no real reason for not doing this I guess.

Although I'm hoping everyone reading this doesn't need this I thought I'd share anyway. A little under a month ago Jeremy Epling (@jeremy_epling) posted on the Microsoft DevOps Blog about the New Navigation for Visual Studio Team Services. I'm not going to repeat the very detailed blog post but I am going to show you how to enabled the amazing experience quickly.

I received a new error today that I haven't received before when deploying dotnet core apps. It was as the title suggest a "HTTP Error 502.5 - Process Failure" error

At MVP Summit this year one of the valuable things I learnt (which I can share ) was from Colin Dembovsky (ALM MVP) which was Using Chrome to Solve Identity Hell. Now I knew chrome profiles existed but never thought of using them to solve the problem of different identities, in-private mode was a way of doing things but you always lost that when closing the session so wasn't that great. Not going to talk much about that here, you can read his post to find out more.

I’ve probably mentioned it before but keeping up with what’s happening with VSTS is incredible hard with their 3 week cadence and generally huge set of features each 3 weeks. This week at MVP Summit I had what I thought would be a cool request to allow wild card branch policies. I was thinking of writing a console app to do this but thought it would be interesting to ask the product group as it’s part of the many benefits of being a MVP .

This is a quick reference post that shows you how to create a branch in VSTS and TFS.

Today I played with a new .net core template just to see what the authentication options were out the box and was surprised to see just how easy it is to go from nothing to having a base project that has authentication fully baked in with 2 factor authentication and email verification.

A couple days ago I needed to call a remote web api call in my AuthorizeAttribute sometimes but as mentioned in this (Is it possible to use async/await in MVC 4 AuthorizeAttribute?) StackOverflow question (and other forums) it isn’t supported but is in the newer .net core. Unfortunately the project I needed this on was traditional MVC so I was left still finding a way .

There is documentation available for Move resources to new resource group or subscription but things are easier to do with exact sample code so here it goes . The steps below will work for moving between Resource Groups as well, you'll just skip some steps that would be obvious.

This post might seem weird and is slightly. It's really just a pointer as with all my posts to send people to instead of sharing lots of text "on the down low" 😁.

I see this message most times I format my machines after opening existing projects in Visual Studio and I always forgot how I solve it

If you have TFS on the domain but you are trying to connect agents to it from outside the domain and TFS is not running on https then this post is for you.

This post is largely showing off a cool feature of chrome but the core focus is how you can be more productive with VSTS search

With the rate that the VSTS team releases with all the features they releasing it's hard to know everything that exists in VSTS. I recently needed to migrate git repos from various Team Project Collections (TPC) into a single Team Project and started out doing it very manually and slowly progresses to importing over 100 in a couple hours .

Today I tried to join one of my machines to the insider preview. Most people if they get issues would probably take it as a sign that putting the broken bits on their machine was a bad idea and the universe has saved them…I need my broken bits fix .

Everyone at some point needs to convert and html page into a PDF for some reason or another. For this I've always used a component which was cheap at the time (and is far from it now). This component has worked well for the last 8(ish) years, most ish in the last while because it doesn't deal well with https sites. When contacting the vendor they said hey but our latest version which can be expected I guess because it's 8 years down the line but then came the it's ALL OF THE $ . The last issue is that the component I used doesn't work in Azure. That lead me to some investigation and then ultimately this post.

I often never really test on mobile properly because most sites are responsive so it's easier to just resize your browser and test like that. This works great until you trying to get the perfect mobile experience and looking at every element like how drop lists present themselves with different content taking into account how wrapping might happen in mobile browser controls (which is different from web browser, even in chrome ). A long time ago I briefly used ngrok just to test how it works and now I use it constantly for testing apps while they are still in development.

I've recently started catching up with all the blogs that I've wanted to write and have had flagged to write for a long time. This one I have had flagged since 26 January 2016.

You might be wondering after recently posting Setting up a standard continuous integration build with VSTS/TFS why I'd need to post specifically on .net core. After all it's still a Visual Studio solution so things should just work, the keyword here is should . Things didn't just work when I tried to get this working so decided to share my experience here (as well as document it for myself later ).

If you do a quick Google for pros of setting up continuous integration you'll come across a lot of articles about how good setting up continuous integration (CI) is compared to googling cons of setting up continuous integration which basically gives you the same posts of the the pros search so we won't dig too much into that now .

Firstly you might want to know why would you want to implement a dynamic robots.txt? Isn't it better to just put a static file in the web app? Yes it is but when you running your application on certain platforms like web apps in Azure when you using deployment slots. I found this handy link which explains deployment slots quite nicely , but basically what happens is when you switch 2 slots Azure will do a virtual IP switch so traffic from your slots will now be switched (not the files from each slot).

If you've installed Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise and weren't one of the people that went over to the Individual Components tab to see what you weren't installing you probably don't have Microsoft Test Manager installed.

I'm busy going through Pluralsight watching Exploring C# 6 with Jon Skeet by Rob Conery. Jon Skeet goes ahead and makes this epic method that looks like it's so naughty but is pretty cool.

If you've done any amount of development where you need to interact with data you'd know that at some point customers or stakeholders always want to know who made that change or when was that change made. To answer these questions you'd look to your auditing which in most cases is the last thing people think about adding into their apps for some reason.

The other day I saw a post that Greg Duncan shared about opening CMD and PowerShell from the directory you in.

I’m hoping it’s not just me but one of the things I was missing from SSMS 2014 is that I had my line breaks when copying large text fields out of the query results. For a long time I have been putting it off and only using SSMS 2014, last week I re-installed my Operating System and decided not to install SSMS 2014 just for this 1 feature.

A couple weeks ago I was asked to present at DUT to a group of students. The presentation was quite a long one so I had to cut some bits out in order to present in the timeslot that I had. So I decided that I'd record all the content and post it up so that others can potentially benefit from it as well.

When I first heard about the SDK for widgets in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) I wanted to make a couple of widgets, one of these was a GitHub widget that would show some info from any GitHub repo on your VSTS dashboard. This can can be helpful when you have your source open on GitHub but still work out of VSTS.

So you could make a script that can do the bits below but if you don’t here is how you can easily create build agents fast for TFS 2015+ or VSO.

So everyone wants to have the ultimate system that never breaks can handle ‘all’ the users and shows no strain when doing so. How do you accomplish something like this? Well you could hire developers that know all the best ways to do everything, experts in everything related to configuring applications to run the best that they can on the hardware and software it sits on but what’s the odds of that happening. The other option is to have a bank account that is never ending and throw ‘all’ the hardware at your application to make sure it doesn’t ever have a slow day but then how are you making your money, how do you know when ‘all’ the hardware isn’t enough.

So if you using windows 10 and doing some web development you would probably have noticed that you can't browse localhost for some reason. And there is a couple of feedback items for it in the Windows Feedback app.

So if you haven't heard yet VSO Extensions are now in a private preview where you can sign up to get into the preview on extensions integration site. These extensions in the shortest sentence a supported way of doing customizations to VSO that will replace any of the "hacky" extensions that you may be playing around with at the moment like Tiago Pascal's Task Board Enhancer or maybe you have even created your own following similar steps to what I show in my TFS 2013 Customization book.

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

So speaking to any smart database people they will generally tell you that the SELECT * FROM ... is a bad idea and should not be used. Today (well would of been if I didn't procrastinate) I spent many hours debugging something from the wrong places because I used SELECT *. Below is what I found out =).

Rennie Moodley helped me understand what was happening after I figured out where the problem was, helped me create the sample code below and then the 2 of us and Christopher Swart poked at and improve the sample and found some more weirdness which you'll also see below.

The number 1 thing voted for under Taskbar currently is to hide the new Search bar and task view buttons

I had some "Weird" things happening with IIS on one of my developer machines. After trouble shooting for a while I decided that was definitely not winning and removed all features from my pc that were even the slightest related to IIS, my pc required a restart so I did. When it came back I re-enabled all the features as I would normally do and then attempted to put my dev site in IIS. For some reason all the sites were stopped and when trying to start them I received the message

Ok so obviously the first you need is to have a VSO account. If you have one already, awesome, continue on and skip this section.

This is just an FYI

If you haven't heard yet Microsoft Virtual Academy are running "know it. Prove it". This is a great opportunity to learn something new or extend your current knowledge in one of the 8 topics available. 

This post has been ported from http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/MS+SQL+2012/93043/ which I then repeated on https://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/failover-or-restart-results-in-reseed-of-identity-fix/.

In the new Azure Portal you create all your resources in Resource Groups, there is also as part of the Azure SDK's a module called AzureResourceManager  by default the module loaded for the Azure SDK is AzureServiceManagement. A blurb from one of the Azure documentation page reads

Open the Azure Management Portal, login and then navigate to the Active Directory tab and click on the Active Directory resource you want to add a user to, alternatively create a new Azure Active Directory resource and then come back to this post.

If you have logged into the Azure Management Portal and see a message like below then you need to have a azure subscription assigned to you in order to use the portal and this post is going to help you (probably your Administrator) assign a subscription to your account.

If you've been using Application Insights for a while now you would have noticed that with recent Visual Updates the Application Insights SDK had been updated to use a new version that logs AI data into the new Azure Portal. From this if you use Windows Store Apps you would probably have noticed that if you instrument a Windows Store application with the new SDK that you can't actually find your data anywhere although you can see it being logged from the Visual Studio Output window and using Fiddler. The good news is that you will soon be able to have a great experience with the new AI SDK for Windows Store apps as you do for your currently for your web applications, the better news is that below you'll see how to use the new SDK for your Store Apps and see the data in the Azure Portal.

Friend of Red Gate (and .NET MVP) Mitchel Sellers will be hosting it for us alongside Red Gate's APP product manager Ben Emmett. We're running it in conjunction with LinkedIn group LIDNUG (LinkedIn .NET User Group) who have over 52,000 members so we're hoping to get a big list of people signed up! Feel free to sign up yourself or let anyone know who you think might be interested in registering.

I have been using Codealike for a while now and thought I'd share my experience and things that I like about codealike with everyone. I did mention codealike on This Week on Ch9 when I hosted it last week with Greg Duncan.

Today my DotNet Pretty articles were featured on @coding4fun by Greg Duncan and one of the comments by Niner bc3tech (@bc3tech) requested that I share this solution on Chocolatey. I decided that this was a good idea and decided to share my experience .

So yesterday I posted Pushing a new project to Chocolatey and I said I would create another post showing how to configure how the Chocolatey install runs and this is that post .

So you shouldn't need to do this but in my case for some reason I needed to activate windows after performing and upgrade from Windows 8.1.

In windows 10 when you go to Change the background and colors on Start

I need a VSO account for Demos which needs to be separate from my personal and business VSO accounts. The problem is though if you go to the Visual Studio Online page and click Get started for free

My internet connection is slow or down quite a lot. One of the things Robert MacLean pointed out today in a presentation at a Microsoft Dev Day event today is that is that you can make use of the local cache from previous downloaded packages. Below is how to do this

I used to highlight a bunch of text (a couple of statements) then press F5 to execute that statement. With this new release you are able to easily execute the current statement by pressing Shift + F5.

I use to make a lot of TFS customizations and had to apply the template changes to multiple team projects which took a bit of time. Depending on the method you use it could be a quick or loooong process . When I first started doing customizations I used the TFS Power Tools to upload changes which is a lot of effort because you are uploading one work item definition at a time into one team project.

In my last post (Introduction to DotNet Pretty) I mentioned that I would be added more visualizers to DotNet Pretty soon . Today I finally managed to get around to that and added some visualizers for TFS Work Items.

This post has been ported from https://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/creating-fake-tfs-builds/.

Another thing that come out of last weeks training was Visual Studio Debuggers. This lead to me finding the coolest visualizer ever called TPL Dataflow Debugger Visualizer which allows you to easily visualize your TPL Dataflow

I was looking for a PowerShell script that would remove all media tags (post coming) from a folder of music that I have and along the way I came across a blog post called PowerShell - Automatically organizing your mp3-collection. Although this wasn't exactly what I was looking for right now I gave it a try and then thought to share it after I made a couple of changes to make it work on my machine and categorize a bit more . You can grab the script off GitHub Gist organise-music.ps1.

Up until about an hour ago I thought I knew how optional parameters worked but didn't actually. I thought (probably without giving it too much thought) that optional parameters would compile to something that would reflect having multiple overloads as when they came out I ripped out 100s of overloads across multiple libraries and replaces them with optional parameters because it replace code like

So a year ago today I joined the ALM Rangers family and have recently been "promoted" into an active ALM Ranger and worked on projects like Upgrade Guide, Version Control (ex Branching and Merging) Guide and Flight Plan.

This post has been ported from http://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/how-to-get-your-identity-tokens/.

During Channel 9 Live: Defrag Tools Live – Mark Russinovich, Mark Russinovich mentioned that one of the apps might not have been up to date on the machine he was showing really cool things on . So then I thought hey I never update my sys internals apps.

So you have a project that uses Application Insights and want to share it with the world. Sure you just post it to CodePlex, GitHub or some other place that allows publishing of code don't you.

If you haven't heard or read about Application Insights you should go to MSDN and read up on all the awesomeness that you can get by using this new feature of VSO. You can also take a look at the Channel 9 series on Application Insights for Visual Studio Online by Charles Sterling.

Updates have been made, see the end of the post

I watch and download a lot of videos from Channel 9 and because I’m a developer and always looking for ways to speed up anything I do I searched for a PowerShell script. I eventually found one (can’t remember where) and immediately set it up to download This Week on Channel 9 and Ping Show. Over time I have added many other shows, events and series. The initial script I was found with some modifications was

UPDATE: This has been identified as a bug and will be fixed in the next release for on-premise

Have you heard about the campaign that Packt Publishing is running at the moment? They are celebrating 2000 published titles, below are just 3 of the titles that you can get. For more info see http://bit.ly/1j26nPN.

Did you hear? Somasegar blogged that Team Foundation Server 2013 RC is a go-live release. What does that mean for you and your customers? One word

For the last while I have been experiencing weird hangs with Visual Studio 2013. To try identify what was causing the hangs or at least where about the problem was I ran ProcMon.exe on devenv.exe and the point where Visual Studio hung I was getting the below output recursively

If you haven't heard or read about Application Insights you should go to MSDN and read up on all the awesomeness that you can get by using this new feature of VSO. You can also take a look at the Channel 9 series on Application Insights for Visual Studio Online by Charles Sterling.

So I'm starting to go through some of the content on Microsoft Virtual Academy but I don't have time to do this when I'm by a good internet connection and at the same time don't have time when by the good internet connection to run though all the content I need to download it to watch in my spare time.

This post was originally found on my old blog at http://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/tf400324-team-foundation-services-are-not-available-from-server/.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 has been released and as usual you are able to use the /layout argument to download all the files so you can share them locally instead of everyone downloading them. As mentioned in Brian Harry's blog here there is no update for TFS this time round but good things are coming for TFS Update 2.

In these posts we will be going through creating different elements that can be found in the Team Explorer, the aim is to give you the ground knowledge required to extend Team Explorer your way. For an example of some great Team Explorer plugins that demonstrate how much you can do take a look at Team Rooms for Visual Studio 2013 and News which were created by Utkarsh Shigihalli and Tarun Arora for Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2013.

In Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 2 we created a Team Explorer Navigation Item and we will be using that item in this post and therefore assume that you have been through it already and created the navigation item.

In Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 3 we created a Team Explorer Page and we will be using that item in this post and therefore assume that you have been through it already and created the page.

So we use CheckPoint VPN, but the most frustrating part is that when a new version on windows is released the CheckPoint VPN client is incompatible with it and makes your computer weird when you do try use it.

So one of the benefits of using Server side Plugins is that you can't override them. The problem with this is that the users don't know that the policy is in place until they check-in their code. Wouldn't it be nice if me as a user were told this is what I need to do as in see the requirements from check-in policies but then to make the administrators or business rules that require the policies to also be happy.

So yesterday and update for Brian Keller's VM (Visual Studio 2013 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts) was release

In Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 1 we setup a base to start extending Team Explorer, this post assumes you have already have the base project setup.

Creating a new Team Explorer Navigation Item

Add a new const to the GuidList class (in the Guids file) like below

Today I find myself with yet another bit of functionality that only works when you are running in Administrator Mode. A while back I had Full Admin Mode always enabled, downside of this is the store apps don't work at all. Up side is your PC works as expected . I created a PowerShell script to download Channel 9 videos as described in my post Easily download Ch9 videos, this script worked perfectly but recently started breaking with the error

Today I got a weird error on code that should just work.

The other night while watching the Visual Studio 2013 Launch a question came up asking if the team had added support yet for automatically linking work items to the change set created  when checking in as it currently is in Git. Currently this functionality doesn't exist for TFVC Check ins, at the time I didn't think anything of it but tonight for some reason I thought "hey that would be something simply to create and should hopefully make lives easier for developers". So I opened up Visual Studio and at the same time started a new project on GitHub for TFS Server Plugins. The code required for the plugin was very basic, basically just checked the comment from the check in with a regular expression and then added the links between the change set and all the IDs found in the comments.

I have been playing around with TypeScript for a while and usually I just publish from my machine but today I decided to setup a CI build for the solution and found that I received the error

Generally the longest and most frustrating part of using a 3rd party API is making all the C# classes that the data will plugin to after you make requests into those API’s.

So this is my first post in my new blog which I should be using for quite a bit longer than I Currently have been using my previous blogs on WordPress. I am using a base that was started by Mads Kristensen on GitHub called MiniBlog. I am trying where possible or requested pushing some changes back into the project so that others can also get extra functionality.