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Experiences at the 2024 Microsoft AI Tour in Sydney

This week was a lot of firsts for me - I took my first trip to Sydney in over 5 years, to visit my first large Microsoft event, volunteers for the first time helping run some of the workshop events, as a first time MVP! PHEW!

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Moving from Serilog to ILogger in an existing .NET Framework

I love Serilog and have been using it for many years, in the past together with Seq (these days I mostly just use Application Insights).

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Avoiding repeated Web.config transformations in Azure Devops pipelines

I recently experienced an issue where the way I was doing web.config transformations was resulting in duplicated lines in the transformed file, after it was pumped through an Azure DevOps pipeline build and release.

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Defining JSON-structured config in Azure App Service configuration

We’ve just gone live with our new infrastructure on Azure, which (temporarily) will use YARP to proxy all requests in our .NET Core web app to our old .NET Framework app, where they haven’t yet been ported across to the Core app.

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Using Multiple Bindings with Azure Functions in Isolated Worker Process Mode

As I’ve just written about in my article about Upgrading Azure Functions to .NET 7, I’ve been working on changing some Azure Functions from .NET 6 using the “in-process” mode, to .NET 7 using the “isolated worker process” mode.

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Upgrading Azure Functions to .NET 7 Isolated Worker Process

I’ve been working this weekend on changing some Azure Functions from .NET 6 using the “in-process” mode, to .NET 7 using the “isolated worker process” mode. Do I know how to make the most of glorious weather?? I sure do!

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Using YARP with multiple domains

I’m currently going through the process of upgrading one of my ASP.NET web applications from .NET Framework (4.8) to .NET 6 (Core, baby!). As anyone who has been through this or attempted to start this process would know, as soon as you’re dealing with a website that is not “simple”, it can be a very slow and arduous process. Things like databases and authentication have a nasty way of getting in the way.

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Setting directory permissions with Octopus Deploy

If you follow me on Twitter, you’d probably be sure of one thing by now: I love Octopus Deploy! I have been quite vocal about lately, as it’s made my life so much easier and every time I use it to deploy a site I have a little giddy moment of happiness.

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Mocking users in ASP.NET MVC 5

So historically unit testing has been a constant non-starter for me. It seems every time I start to write unit tests (whether it’s in an attempt to do some TDD, or just trying produce unit tests for an existing piece of code), I struggle to get over the hump of dependencies that I’ve incidentally placed in my way without even thinking.

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Moving Entity Framework migrations to another project

This happens to me quite often, because of the way I tend to work with new projects: I’ve created a new web application, got it up and running and set up my initial code first migration, start working on the model (maybe another few migrations for new tables etc) and then realise that I want to move the database to a separate “data layer” project AFTER I’ve already started running the migrations.

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Setting up SendGrid 7.0.0 in ASP.NET

Today I was starting up a new ASP.NET Web Application using the ASP.NET Identity membership system, for a micro site I’m building, and my first task was to get the email confirmation working for accounts (and subsequently to prevent logging in until email has been confirmed). I decided to try out SendGrid rather than using my own SMTP server, mostly because, well, Microsoft told me I should 😉

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Getting Ghost Running on Bash on Windows

Well I won’t say that was the easiest process, but I’ve just got an installation of the Ghost blogging platform running on my Bash on Windows system.

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Getting going with Bash on Windows

Patiently I waited, and you know what they say “good things come to those who wait”. When I first heard about the release of Bash on Windows (which is run via the Windows Subsystem for Linux, here is a great overview), I was so excited that you’d think I had nothing else going for me in my life (for the record, I do… I’m just easily excited by shiny things).

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Structured Logging with Serilog in ASP.NET Core

I recently discovered the beautify of Serilog for logging from my ASP.NET (pre core) web apps, and converted one of my projects across completely to using it (rather than a haphazard, custom file logger that was written by myself years ago). Serilog is a powerful logging library that allows you to do structured logging, allowing you to basically have fields against any log messages (aka log events) containing serialised data - strings, integers, objects, etc.

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My Brief Affair With Microsoft Edge

Since the dawn of the internet, we have fought over which browser is “better”. I personally have gone from Internet Explorer, to Firefox (a long stopover for a few years), to Chrome for the last couple of years. Like with fashion, though, it seems I’m always a step behind - every time I mention these days that I use Chrome, I prepare myself for an onslaught of “oh that’s so last year”, “you mean the memory hog?”, and “why haven’t you switched to yet?"!

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Bootstrap validation in ASP.Net MVC

I use Bootstrap in almost every project I build these days. I build up a custom Bootstrap configuration to reduce bloat, and have my workflow down-pat for updating those configurations (which I’ll write about in the near future). I have familiarised myself with it’s ins-and-outs to help ensure I use it to it’s full potential without being overkill, and it has sped up my HTML build time immensely.

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Mapping Shapefiles with CartoDB

I’ve done a lot of work with Google Maps over the last few years, and when the CartoDB service came up on my radar a while ago I was intrigued, but the projects I was working on all had a “rushed” timeline on them which meant it was never a good time to play with a new system… until recently!

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ASP.NET WebForms ScriptResource error

You know those days when you wonder how you stay sane in this line of work?! I’ve just come across a little gotcha that I’ve just spent almost an hour trying to nut out, so thought I’d share a potential time saver with others!

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Developer Tip: ASP.NET Configuration in Visual Studio 2010

I’ve just come across a strange issue in Visual Studio 2010, when trying to launch and access the ASP.NET Configuration tool (used for configuring security settings).

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