A GitHub Action for Testing Against a PostgreSQL Database
Automated testing is an integral part of any software development project. Developers should be building these tests while they work on the actual code. A significant value of automated tests is that they can be run on every pull request. This can ensure that the tests are run in a consistent environment and not just…
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Postman Tests
Postman is a tool we use to test our APIs while building them. Its UI helps make this stage in development quick and easy. But a lot of the work we do in Postman is often single-use. We write the tests, but why can’t we keep them? Actually, we can keep them. Follow along as…
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Estimating Your Cloud Costs
Estimating cloud costs isn’t always easy, especially if your goal is to be super exact. The desire to be super precise will probably cause you to spend more time estimating the costs of resources than the resources might cost themselves. Always remember that development time is expensive. Trying to estimate down to the dollar isn’t…
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SQL Server Single-User Mode
Sometimes you can’t get into SQL Server. Maybe you forgot a password, or something got misconfigured. You are locked out. What to do when this happens? My go-to is putting SQL Server in Single-User Mode. Doing this is pretty straightforward. First, open a command shell in administrator mode. Then stop the SQL Server Service. net…
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APIs and the Cloud
Application programming interfaces (APIs) communicate into software. If user interfaces are ways for humans to interact with software, then APIs are ways for software to communicate with other software. As we write applications, our software makes extensive use of APIs. Sometimes those APIs are purely at a platform level, maybe file read and write. Sometimes…
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How to Use Angular FormArray(s) within FormGroup(s) In Reactive Forms
Are you trying to use a FormArray on a dynamic/reactive Angular Form, but it is not working? This should help you solve your problem. Start by setting up a new project: ng new [name your project] Then create the component: ng g component [component name] You should now see something like this: Next, let’s add…
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Setting Up an Azure File Share on a VM
For a recent project I was working on, we needed to set up a new FTP server. This server would receive files via FTP, and then these files would be moved to a temporary machine for further processing. This process needed to be automated and be executed reliably, and without having to log in or…
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A Super Simple JWT Example
Need to set up a JSON Web Token (JWT) in a project with a .NET Core 3.1 backend? Here’s a quick and dirty example of how to do it. First, create a Web Application project. After we have a web application project, we are already pretty close to done. .NET makes this process easy. The…
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A Proxy Controller for Managers?
All of the systems we design use essentially the same layered architecture. Our top layer is the manager layer. That layer is often consumed directly from our controllers in our ASP.NET projects. This usually results in us writing many thin methods that just call our managers. But what if we didn’t have to write those…
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JWT Verification Outside of an ASP.NET Application
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are common in today’s web-based world. The notion of JWTs works really well inside of the SPA to Web API world that many of us are currently developing. In these systems, the JWT is created by the user when the signs into the system. After sign-in, a JWT is created and…
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