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

In  Part 1  We identified the problem i was recently asked to investigate and looked at getting some output from the batch script being run by the Windows Task Scheduler. As this was a production environment, there was little that could be modified and remote debugging wasn't an option. In this part 2 post, we will continue to fault find touching on the Python and .Net components i mentioned previously and get to the point where the problem is fully identified and subsequently fixed without any changes made to the production code. Having started to receive output, the next step was to make some sense of it. The first thing i did was wrap the area of interest in the python script with a try catch 1) some generic exception try: except: print "Exception: %s" % (sys.exc_info()[0]) Exception: Query Error This was at least a start in that it looked database related at this point The next task was to identify the type of exception being thrown ...

NuGet pack Unable to cast object of type 'System.String' to type 'NuGet.Frameworks.NuGetFramework Came across a rather misleading error message above today while attempting to pack and publish a .Net Standard class library project to a private feed as a DevOps Artifact. Well, it turns out that the NuGet Pack and NuGet Push are not supported by NuGet 4.x at this time. The workaround is to use the .Net core specific build tasks which include commands for pack and publish as show below: At Assemblysoft we specialise in  Custom Software Development  tailored to your requirements. We have experience creating Booking solutions, as we did for HappyCamperVan Hire. You can read more  here . We can onboard and add value to your business rapidly. We are an experienced Full-stack development team able to provide specific technical expertise or manage your project requirements end to end.  We specialise in the Microsoft cloud and .NET Solutions and Services . Our ...

H ardware is essentially a vehicle for Software.   With many projects requiring very specific hardware requirements, such as printing without  start-up  time, artificial intelligence, and more  controversial  projects like Bitcoin Mining, the route to market could be significantly improved with a more agile and iterative approach.        -  open-source hardware  Project Olympus   One of the goals  behind P roject Olympus is to close the gap of the average 1.5 years of  development cycle for hardware and get closer to the  typical  increments being achieved for  software development.        the incompleteness theorem    Microsoft's rationale for sharing an incomplete design is that "open source hardware development is currently not as agile and iterative as open-source software. ... By sharing designs that are actively in deve...

Coming up with a branching strategy that works well can be challenging when working with multiple developers and managing release cycles. A simple approach is presented here to manage release cycles, with a small to medium sized team of developers while still being able to react to production issues and fix bugs. The primary goal being to isolate work streams without impacting development progress. Background Git does not enforce any particular strategy when it comes to branching which is partly what makes it such a great and flexible repository. The problems start to arise though as you move into different stages of your development process. As an example, you have a release almost complete but don’t want to impede progress on the upcoming release cycle which is where the majority of effort is required. The Basic Approach The focus is around producing a release while still being able to react to hotfixes or production issues without impacting on going development of featu...

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 ...