Home on Codewrecks

If you look at previous post on the subject I’m experimenting with Copilot Chat to have it automate mundane, repetitive operation but that can operate on complex classes.

In real world software you often have complex classes, in this situation we have AtomicReadmodels in a project heavily based on Event Sourcing.

Have you ever encountered an issue obtaining an authentication token for your Azure DevOps npm package feed?

While running a program, when an exception occurs, sometimes it’s easy to figure out what caused it.

Castle Windsor is a beautiful library for implementing inversion of control, but sometimes problem arise when it is used in projects that start with Full Framework and must be converted to ASP.NET Core during their lifetime.

New Copilot X from GitHub is the next big thing for programmers, because it brings the power of copilot to the next level.

In Azure DevOps, using tags allows you to easily classify work items.

As a programmer, I often find myself seeking ways to expedite the initial stages of a software development project.

If you use GPG keys to verify your commits, you’ll be glad to know that in GitHub Codespaces, signing is done automatically.

When developing a code library, it is good practice to publish it on a package manager like NuGet.

In a previous blog post, I discussed how to reschedule the check of a pull request using a simple PowerShell script within an Azure DevOps pipeline.

In previous post on this subject Reschedule PR Check with API I’ve demonstrated a simple PowerShell api script that can automatically re-queue all checks for Opened pull Requests where the check is expired.

Pull Requests checks are a perfect gate to keep your code quality High.

Pull Requests are the heartbeat of a project, and it is probably one of the reason to move to Git if you still are in a different source control.

Scenario: We created a new Agent Pool in Azure DevOps called “linux” and we added some docker based agents, and finally we add this new pool into the available pool for a couple of builds.

Pipeline decorators are a really peculiar feature of Azure DevOps, because they allow you to specify a series of tasks that are run for EVERY pipeline in your organization, so they are rarely needed, but nevertheless they are a nice tool to know because t…

I really love Using Hugo and Codespaces to write blog posts, I’ve a really better blogging experience than wordpress, because I have a simple blog, quick to load, no frills no fuzzes, just a simple blog.

Some days ago I got a call from a friend at customer site that experiences some problems with Azure DevOps server.

Pull Requests is the moment when new code undergo formal review to verify that it mets the basic quality requirement decided by the team.

Sometimes you need to have a unique number in your pipeline, usually this is needed to generate a unique version number as an example for publishing NuGet packages and avoid conflict.

Situation: You are waiting a pipeline to run, you view at the agent pool queue and notice that some of the agents are in idle, they are not running any pipeline, yet you have run that are waiting in queue.

There are lots of reason why you have an on-premise installation of Azure DevOps, and if you manage it, you must devote some time to keep it upgraded to the latest version.

One of the most common scenario where Azure DevOps API shine is exporting data into some other db/file.

In previous article of the series I’ve played with Azure DevOps api connection showing how you can use a .NET 4.8 full framework application that can login to Azure DevOps with a token or with an interactive login.

Keycloak is a leader in the landscape of Identity Provider and if you need a quick instance for dev testing, you can spin an instance in Azure App Services in less than a minute.

Quite often people asks me how to interact programmatically with Azure DevOps server, main purpose is retrieving data for custom reporting but also interacting with Work Item store etc.

Asp.NET core and .NET core comes with a nice interface to handle encryption, as documented here.

The symptom is simple, you have a solution that uses some authenticated Nuget feed, like those hosted on Azure DevOps, suddenly Visual Studio stops authenticating and get a 401 error, or simply does not show any version of packages.

Sometimes it just happens, you issue some Git command and you found that Azure DevOps deny Authentication, and it does not prompt for new credentials, so you are just stuck not being able to access your account anymore.

When you use extensively Azure DevOps feeds, you will end with lots of small project that automatically publish packages at each build.

The situation I’ve had the need to upgrade some code that uses IMAP folder to download email, and it uses sometimes Office365 accounts, but Microsoft will remove in the future basic auth as described here in favor of OAuth2 based authentication.

Let’s examine a simple situation, in Azure DevOps you do not have a way to change pipeline priority, thus, if you need to have an agent always ready for high-priority builds, you can resort using more agent Pools.

Pull Requests are the Heart Beat of your code, you have a request/bugfix/feature in a form of work item, the team start a branch, write code, then when the code is finished a Pull Request is opened to ask the team for review before the code is merged into…

Looking in old backup and old disk can be a dive in the past, you found old stuff like articles tutorial and yesterday I stumbled on my old tutorial on Playstation 2.

First of all, every C# programmer should know that Dictionary<Tkey, Tvalue> class (as well as other collections) have a special constructor that can be used to specify the serializer used to compare keys in the dictionary.

The problem of not using TLS in developer machines Lots of time ago, at the time Windows Communication Foundation was a thing, there were good automatic protections by Microsoft that prevent passing credentials in clear text over an unencrypted (non TLS)…

The situation This is a simple scenario: I use a WebClient object in .NET to perform some web request to a target web site, everything went good except when the code runs in Xamarin Android, where it throws an exception in https connection.

Scenario: you have a software where you have a standard search made in UI for data in a board, then you need to move the search server side (due to the increasing number of object in the board), so you switch to ElasticSearch to have nice full text functi…

If you work in Scrum, being able to visualize data on current and past Sprints is an invaluable way to keep track on team improvement.

I’ve blogged in the past about symbol server, to recap here is the scenario.

After Microsoft acquisition of GitHub there is some bit of confusion on what to use: Azure DevOps or GitHub for your new projects?

GitHub Actions are closing the gap with Azure DevOps pipelines day by day, one of the features introduces months ago was Action templates, the ability to re-use actions definitions between repositories.

Creating full build in PowerShell has lots of advantages because you can simply launch the script and having the build run in any environment.

GitHub takes security seriously and gives you some nice capabilities to improve security of your code through all its lifecycle.

Continuous integration is absolutely vital for a healthy software project, but in many situation people gave little attention to security.

Security is one of my side passion on computer engineering, and if you also like security, Try Hack Me is a nice place to keep under your radar.

Pipeline decorators are a really peculiar feature of Azure DevOps, because they allow you to specify a series of tasks that are run for EVERY pipeline in your organization, so they are rarely needed, but nevertheless they are a nice tool to know because t…

We have an application with ASP.NET web api plus an angular frontend and we use a client library for translation that is based on plain json files hosted on the server.

Azure DevOps is a really big product and sometimes there are really useful features that are poorly publicized and goes under the radar.

If you need to copy files in a Azure Blob or in an Azure Virtual machine within a Azure DevOps pipeline, Azure File Copy Task is the right task to use, but sometimes you could find some problem that make it fails.