.Net Development, Azure, DevOps, Ideas and Life...

A feature that caught my eye is the App Service Editor , a preview addition to the  Development Tools  section of the navigation bar of your app in the Azure Portal. ☁ In essence it is a  web-based editor for App Service. That's right, you can edit and save your web site LIVE with a clean, easy to use, web editor! We have already come to love the Visual Studio Team Services code editor, which allows code and config edits pre-deployment but this feature is production level, post deploy / release. Cannot stress how useful this is for quick fixes and post deployment edits which would otherwise mean re-deploying or falling back to FTP. Project  Kudu  has been around for a while now but great to see it appearing as a first class citizen in the portal. The underlying functionality is provided by the  Monaco Editor , which powers Visual Studio Code . It is worth noting that if Continuous Integration (CI) has been enabled for your application, that t...

I was contacted recently with an interesting problem that had arisen for a client where a batch script was not working as expected and silently failing in a production environment. It was being run by the Windows Task Scheduler which was reporting a '1' return code from the Task : Action  history. As the script was configured to run silently there was no easy way to see what was going wrong.  The Event Log did not contain anything useful and u nfortunately, the batch script didn't contain any logging statements. There was also a strong desire not to install any remote tooling or alter the code as it had been working previously and was currently servicing. I thought i would share the steps taken to identify and fix the issue as it is not uncommon to be faced with a black box, which seemingly doesn't offer much at first glance, but with a little investigation, the lights can soon be turned back on. Understanding the Stack After some investigation it became ...

CodeProject Introduction In part 1 of this mini-series, we will develop a trivial business logic layer from scratch with a TDD approach with the goal of achieving the following: Better code quality through Red, Green, Refactor Documentation that grows as we develop and remains up to date Automatic regression test harness This will primarily involve creating unit tests first , having them fail , making them pass and then refactoring the code to be of better quality and then re-running the tests. When using tools such as resharper  to aid in refactoring code , having the tests in place right from the beginning really gives you peace of mind that you haven't broken anything. It also helps the thought processes while designing and developing an application or feature to be more targeted. We will further develop the application in part 2 to add an MVC4 web client and continue the TDD story...  Some Background Test First  or Test Driven development is...