Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
Debugging LINQ
LINQ is awesome! It allows you to write very concise and easy to understand queries. However, it also hides the actual queries, which can make debugging a bit more difficult. I recently experienced this firsthand when I had to debug a LINQ statement that I didn’t write. But the silver lining was that I found…
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Subtle Differences Using jQuery Event Handlers
At first glance, these event handlers look almost the same. You probably won’t even find a functional difference in most cases. But trust me, they are hours apart in functionality. $(“#order-details tr”).on(‘click’, function(evt) {/*do something*/}); VS $(“#order-details”).on(‘click’, ‘tr’, function(evt) {/*do something*/}); Let me tell you my story. I was working on a large project with…
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Using Agents to Monitor Code Coverage in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)
A few months back we moved to running a local agent with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) so we didn’t have to worry about the number of minutes we were using each month for our build processes. We had a build server for TeamCity that was sitting idle most of the time, so we installed…
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Back To Basics: Why We Love MSMQ
Note: This post was co-authored by Chad Michel. Clever == Complexity I often say this because I wonder if we would be better served by simply using “old” technology and focusing on being better software designers. I really think we can accomplish this without becoming masters of the latest frameworks (although it is hard to…
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Boxing Day (No, not the day after Christmas)
The topic of object boxing and unboxing came up on our development Slack channel recently, so I realized that there might be a lot of developers out there who may not know or understand what boxing and unboxing of values are in C#. In short, boxing is the process where a value type is converted…
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Triggering a Build In Visual Studio Online and Check Status
A few months back, Andrew Tarr showed us how to trigger a build from another build using PowerShell. That worked pretty well for us and remains the recommended way to have a chain of builds in Visual Studio Online. However, recently I was working on a project that needed to trigger a build but also get…
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Creating a Self-Signed SSL Certificate for Developing and Testing Against IIS
Sometimes you find yourself needing to develop or test on an encrypted connection. Whether it is an MVC binding forcing you to do SSL or you simply want to get rid of your browser’s mixed content warnings, a local certificate can come in handy. Creating your .cer file Start by locating makecert.exe. You can typically…
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Unit Testing .NET with JustMock (tips and common pitfalls)
In this post, I’d like to share a few tips to get up and running with the Telerik mocking framework JustMock, so you can easily and quickly write tests that give you that warm-and-fuzzy feeling you crave from your code. Notes I assume some familiarity with the concepts of unit testing, dependency injection (DI), Inversion…
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When You Cannot Import ‘Windows_TemporaryKey.pfx’
In one of our current projects, I needed to set up our Xamarin.Forms builds on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). What stumped me was the following error when I was setting up VSTS for a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\AppxPackage\Microsoft.AppXPackage.Targets(3516,5): error APPX0105: Cannot import the key file ‘Windows_TemporaryKey.pfx’. The key file may…
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Setting Up Octopus Server
It may seem like I’m doing a lot of setup lately (see my last post on setting up Continuous Integration). And part of that is true, but I’m also coming up against the realization that so many of the systems we need to stand up are never documented enough to get you through some of…
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