Posts

C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read

Hey Devs, You Are Not Expected To Know Everything

There was a tweet that entered my timeline yesterday that really caught my attention: If you’re a new programmer I just want you to know, me and all of my colleagues with years of experience Google the most basic things _daily_ Accounting Shower Curtain and Unusual Bedroom (@oliviacpu) December 13, 2017 It seems one of the most basic concepts. Yet it gets completely hidden by the developer community. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in a particular language. There are still things you will have to look up EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really started to think about it. Why are we ashamed to admit that publicly? A couple of reasons came to me pretty quickly: Ego and envy.

Thursday, December 14, 2017 | 5 minutes Read

Mentoring Junior Developers

One of the biggest struggles of the development community is the mentoring, encouragement and development of entry-level and junior developers. A couple of years ago when I was adding people to my team, two of those I hired were women essentially right out of college. I found myself faced with a struggle that many dev managers and leads have faced over the years: How do I encourage, train and develop junior developers? I certainly didn’t want either of them to go through the same struggles I went through. When I was hired out of college, I had both advantages and disadvantages. I was a career changer in my mid-30’s. I had worked for more than a decade in various jobs, so the work mindset was not new to me.

mentoring

Friday, December 8, 2017 | 15 minutes Read

Deploy Database Updates With FluentMigrator and VSTS

One extremely handy open source library for .NET developers is FluentMigrator. This package allows you to script out your database changes as C# classes. The concept is similar to the code first migrations of EntityFramework, but allows you a bit more fine tuned control over deployments and doesn’t tie you to any specific ORM or other database interaction model. For example, it’s easy to control which environments the updates go to with tagging. This can help prevent accidental database updates to production and has already saved me from database restores on a couple of occasions.

Thursday, November 30, 2017 | 7 minutes Read

Deploy To A Private NuGet Feed From VSTS

If you work with multiple related projects that exist in separate solutions, one of the more useful features of Visual Studio Team Services is the ability to easily implement private NuGet feeds. This service lets you keep development of various pieces more separate and yet still make it easy to integrate your private libraries into your other applications. Create Your Feed The first step is to create your private feed. Go in to VSTS and open the project that you want put into a feed. Under the “Build and Release” menu item, you should see a secondary menu item called “Packages”. If you don’t see this entry, you will need to install the Package Management Extension from the VSTS Marketplace into your VSTS account. It’s free if you have fewer than 5 users in your VSTS account.

Saturday, November 18, 2017 | 5 minutes Read

My Go-To Visual Studio Extensions

There are a number of extensions for Visual Studio that I always keep installed. Time and again they’ve proven their value for me. Maybe they can do the same for you. I haven’t made the full transition from VS2015 to VS2017 as i use 2015 at work and 2017 at home. Some of these have different versions between the two VS versions. The links below are all to the 2015 versions in those cases.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 | 3 minutes Read

Running a Regularly Scheduled Task with Azure Functions

One of the more recent features of cloud computing is what’s called “serverless computing”. There are a number of different ways in which it is implemented, but for the most part it’s just a way to set up a code function to be able to run without needing to create an entire application and all it’s resources. One of my favorite ways to utilize this feature in Azure apps is to use the functions to kick off nightly maintenance jobs. By using an external function to kick off the job, I am able to keep my Azure web apps set to not be “always on”. This helps keep my costs down, but still lets me kick off regularly scheduled tasks easily. And Azure functions can be written in any of several languages, including JavaScript and C#.

Saturday, November 11, 2017 | 7 minutes Read

VSTS Deployment with Azure App Service Deployment Slots

Utilizing Azure Application Deployment Slots with the Visual Studio Team Services build and deployment system is quite simple. Set Up Deployment Slots The first step is to create your deployment slots for your application. You do this in your Azure Portal. Open the dashboard to your App Service application’s options. About halfway down the menu options that appear for your app you will see “Deployment slots”. Select this option. Click “Add Slot” and give your deployment slot a name. It also asks you to select whether or not to copy the existing configuration options from an existing slot. This will depend on your preferred deployment process. Some people let their deployment instance use all the same configuration options. I usually use the existing database connections, if any, but will alter any message queues, blob storage, table storage, and anything else that can trigger functionality on the back end, I point these to their respective testing versions so I don’t mess with production data unexpectedly. This is especially true for message queues, I feel. I want to be able to control the testing of the staging slot and not have it kick off unexpectedly if some production message gets through.

Saturday, November 11, 2017 | 6 minutes Read

Deploying Service Fabric App with VSTS

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) makes it incredibly easy to deploy Azure Service Fabric applications to your Service Fabric clusters as part of a continuous integration process. There’s just a few easy steps to get it set up and running. Setup Your Service Endpoint VSTS-Service Fabric-Service Endpoint VSTS Endpoint Connection Start with setting up your service endpoint. This will connect your VSTS instance to your Azure Service Fabric. In order to make the connection, you’ll need to use the same security you use to connect to your cluster endpoint. This is usually either certificate based or using Azure Active Directory credentials.

Saturday, November 4, 2017 | 4 minutes Read

My Favorite Podcasts

As developers, we need to receive frequent knowledge downloads from other sources to enhance our skillsets and help us think in new ways. There are all kinds of sources where this can come from: online training, YouTube, Pluralsight, books, classes, and so on. One of my favorite ways to help me think new thoughts are podcasts. What follows is a list of my favorite podcasts, the ones that I listen to on a regular basis. Some are developer focused and some are not. You shouldn’t limit your sources of knowledge:

Tuesday, October 31, 2017 | 4 minutes Read

Avoid Burnout: Take Time To Unplug

One of the biggest struggles that developers face is burnout. I’ve seen it happen time and time and time again. We do too much. We work 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week in an office doing development work, then come home and spend another 20, 30 or more hours at home working on our personal projects or side clients. Add to all that the various levels of personal commitments we might outside of development, be it family, church, charity work, and so forth. All that time takes its toll and, if we’re not careful, it overwhelms us and we burn out. It happened to me.

Saturday, October 28, 2017 | 9 minutes Read

The Worthlessness of Project Estimates: Why We Still Do Them

Whether we are developers, project managers, business analysts, stakeholders or anyone else involved in the software development process, we all know that estimates for software development are always wrong: ALWAYS. I have never once been involved in a software project that met it’s estimates or even came close. Sometimes we get the job done earlier than estimated, but usually it runs over. You know it. I know it. We all know it. Even if that estimate seems reasonable at the time we do it, it always ends up being wrong. So why do we still bother to do them?

Tuesday, October 24, 2017 | 8 minutes Read