The Art of Coding

At Stack Overflow we always try to run on the latest and greatest version of .NET. We love that extra bit of performance that the .NET team…

Secure code is important. Writing secure code is hard. As developers we all know this. Developers often use the OWASP TOP 10, a list of the…

Azure Private Link is a new service on Azure that helps you secure your PaaS services. Normally, if you connect to a SQL Azure database, a…

While doing some cleanup of the agent pools at a customer of mine, I noticed that there was a pool called Hosted Ubuntu 1604. Since the new…

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in…

Code is a form of art. Code can be beautiful. Code can read like poetry. Code can also be ugly. Lately I’ve been working with a lot of…

One of the goals I have with DevOps Utopia is to make it easy for people to join as a contributor and a reader. This should give people…

Lately I’ve been working on a side project that I want to share with the world. Project Utopia is a public project hosted on GitHub and…

Do you know why the daughter always chops off 1” from the steak before putting it in the pan? Because her mother did it. Do you know why the…

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are the foundation of Infrastructure as Code in Azure. An ARM template lets you describe the…

If you’re a software developer, I’m pretty sure you ran into a problem that you didn’t know how to solve. Ranging from bugs to firewall…

If you have followed the previous 3 parts (part 1, part 2, part 3) you have a full CI/CD pipeline that allows you to deploy your own private…

In the previous posts (part 1, part 2) I introduced Packer and showed the build and release scripts that I use to create my own VSTS Agent…

In Part 1 you’ve seen how to use Packer to build a custom image based on a Packer configuration file with an Azure builder and create a new…

I love Visual Studio Team Services. VSTS allows me to focus on building my CI/CD pipeline, running tests and managing my project without…

Someone asked me how I try to stay up to date in the IT industry. Personally, I love reading. I follow a bunch of blogs and try to read as…

The last couple of months I wrote 8 blog posts over what I learned from Microsoft doing DevOps: Moving to Agile & the Cloud Planning and…

Every time I get a message that a platform is going to be down for maintenance somewhere during the night or weekend I cringe a little. I…

Quality and testing is an essential part of application development. This is still true for a DevOps environment where you practice…

In the wonderful world of Cloud, being a T-shaped professional is becoming more and more important. I’m a developer and my knowledge of IaaS…

Security is hard. You only have to follow Troy Hunt and have a look at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see how often companies get hacked and…

Architecting a system that’s used 24/7 by millions of users all around the globe isn’t something most of us do every day. VSTS is one of…

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight. You start doing some fitness, eat less, drink more and you try to get more sleep. When do you know…

How often do you get the chance to work on a product that’s used by millions of users? And as an extra benefit, you even understand what you…

In part 1 I looked at how the Microsoft team that builds VSTS and TFS began on their journey towards Agile, DevOps and Cloud. In this part I…

What would you do if you had the opportunity to have a look inside the kitchen of a Michelin Star restaurant? Not only would you be able to…

When you work on your Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Server extension, you need a VSTS or TFS environment to deploy your…

How do you feel about Microsoft? Do you think that Microsoft is a closed company that does everything in its power to win professionals and…

Feature Flags are an important part of DevOps. Where DevOps is initially about things like breaking down silos and implementing a continuous…

When configuring your Build Definitions on Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Server, you can configure a Continuous Integration…

Styling your code is important. You are reading your code more often then you’re writing it. Making sure that reading is as easy as possible…

Before packaging an extension, I parse the JSON manifest and update the version number. This allows me to set my version at packaging time…

Last week I had the privilege of giving a presentation at the Software Development Network conference. There was a nice turn-out of around…

When using TypeScript, you will need TypeScript definition files to work with external libraries. A lot of those definition files are…

In the previous post, I looked at the distributed nature and local history of Git. In this post I discuss another feature that makes Git…

Git. Some people love it, others hate it. I have to admit that I was in the camp of the haters. Not that I didn’t like Git, I just found it…

In a previous post I showed how to use PowerShell to edit a VSIX file. Because of the cross platform capabilities of the release and build…

A software delivery pipeline starts with a build. A build creates the artifacts you need. You then use these artifacts to deploy to…

Microsoft released new capabilities for building your own dashboard widgets. The Widget SDK is now in public preview. One of the advantages…

The last couple of months I’ve been busy working on my new book: DevOps on the Microsoft Stack DevOps is a popular subject and Microsoft…

One of the many privileges of being an ALM Ranger is that you get the chance to participate in private preview programs where you work…

Last week we had the TechDays here in the Netherlands. I was asked to deliver two sessions and two Ask me Anything sessions. A lot of…

Today I woke up to an email inviting me to the new Azure Dev/Test Lab preview program. The preview program can start any moment now! I’m…

Build is an important part of Application Lifecycle Management. Every DevOps pipeline starts with a Build. Visual Studio Online and Team…

Do you know about the phony feeling when being a developer? That feeling that you actually don’t know anything and that you’re only…

One of the great scenarios for Azure is dev/test. Having the ability to quickly setup an environment in Azure and run your automatic or…

Lately I find myself explaining more and more how to use version control to non-developers. Teams implementing DevOps often ask me the…

Have you ever visited an Ask The Experts event? For those of you who haven’t, ATE are session held at events where you can connect to…

As you may have noticed: Team Foundation Server not only supports TFVC but also supports Git. Now the big question is: why? Microsoft says…

Have you ever read a computer book that was a real page turner? Well, although I love to read, reading technical books is mostly not a real…

Last week I had the privilege of visiting Barcelona. A beautiful city with some great places to visit, nice weather and really nice food…

Lately I often get the question: “Which books do you suggest?”. So since I have only have a finite number of key strokes left, I’m starting…

Fast feedback is important. Knowing you broke something a month ago or just a few minutes ago can make a huge difference. More and more…

Last week I had two presentations and one ask the experts at SDN. If you are in the Netherlands, SDN is a great event to visit! What you may…

What?! PowerShell, isn’t that for IT pro’s? I thought this was a blog by a developer. Well, it’s true that I am a software developer at…

When implementing a Deployment Pipeline for your application, the first step is the Commit phase. This step should do as many sanity checks…

One of the hardest things in software development is naming things. When designing your architecture, creating a method or adding a new…

Application Lifecycle Management is all about getting traceability, visibility and automation into your software development process. When I…

Lately I’ve been working with a client with very strict security rules. One of their policies is that all internet traffic runs through a…

In Continuously deploying your database with Release Management – Part 1, we looked at how to use the Sql Server Data Tools to bring your…

When a friend calls you with a computer problem, probably one of the first things you say is: Have you already restarted your PC? Well…

When it comes to automating the deployment of an application, I always see customers struggling when it comes to the database. Updating a…

While working with Release Management a new deployment suddenly gave an error: ERROR: The deployment for release template ‘XXXX’ has not…

Microsoft Release Management is a great tool.Where the ALM workflow previously ended with a Build server package, Release Management now…

The Team Foundation Server Power Tools contain a great tool called the Best Practice Analyzer. This tool helps you in automatically checking…

A customer started using the Ordina Team Foundation Server to host their project. Everything seemed to work fine. They can connect, check-in…

Are there things in life you just can’t remember? Maybe the name of a colleague, your wedding anniversary or how TFS licensing works? Well…

The last couple of months I’ve been very busy writing my new book: Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 and JavaScript…

Do you know who the ALM Rangers are? Here is a snippet describing what mission the ALM Rangers have: The Visual Studio ALM Rangers provide…

Only six more days and then Microsoft //Build 2014 will start! The schedule still only shows the begin and end times but slowly some details…

When working with data you often work with collections. This could be an array, one of the .NET Framework collections or maybe even a custom…

After only one year, Microsoft released a new version of Visual Studio. The preview and release candidate where already available for a…

Do you sometimes shiver when you see yourself writing line after line of assignments when initializing a new object? Maybe something like…

What do you prefer: a field or a property? Most object oriented gurus will tell you that a property should be preferred. But do you…

A reader posted a question on my blog about the use of ConfigureAwait. His question was about the following paragraph I wrote for the book…

Do you need to worry about memory management in .NET? Although .NET is a managed environment with a garbage collector, this doesn’t mean you…

As Einstein ones said: Any fool can know, the point is to understand. Next to e=mc^2, this is also true when it comes to programming…

This morning my doorbell suddenly rang and a package was delivered. Opening it I found the following book in it: If you squeeze your eyes…

Microsoft did some great work on integrating Azure Websites and Team Foundation Service. It’s really easy to setup continuous deployment by…

In this series of blogs I highlight some of my favorite Visual Studio 2012 features that helped me to increase my productivity. Project…

In this series of blogs I highlight some of my favorite Visual Studio 2012 features that helped me to increase my productivity. I have…

In this series of blogs I highlight some of my favorite Visual Studio 2012 features that helped me to increase my productivity. I have…

In this series of blogs I highlight some of my favorite Visual Studio 2012 features that helped me to increase my productivity. This are the…

See also the other parts Project Round-Tripping How Search improves your productivity How the new Solution Explorer makes your life easier…

Today I was working on a Web Api Controller that integrated with a third party application. The application wants us to return an XML…

Today I was working on integrating with some third party software. I needed to create a web service that should return some XML to the third…

Today I started working on a new WebApi application that uses Windows Authentication. I need the current user to check group access and load…

What is the output of the following program? Answer We all know that multiplication has a higher precedence then addition. So for example:…

Yesterday I blogged about some challenges we where having with a project. Today I want to have a look at how we fixed it and what we learned…

Wouldn’t you love to work on a Greenfield project? A fresh start where you can make sure that you don’t repeat any of your prior mistakes! A…

When you start the development of your new software project you have some important choices to make. Some things can easily be changed later…

One of the things I hadn’t done any sessions on where the design principles behind Windows 8 Metro applications. So today I started with a…

Day 3 didn’t have a keynote so we could choose our own sessions. The first session I went to was about Sql Server Data Tools. Microsoft SQL…

Day 2 started with a great keynote about Windows 8. I have to say I really like the new Metro style. Off course this a matter of personal…

Today the TechEd Europe conference officially started and it was a really great day. The day started with the keynote. The keynote was…

This years TechEd Europe is in Amsterdam so for me it feels like home ;-) So this year it’s a perfect opportunity to attend my first TechEd…

What does var mean in C#? Write a console application that outputs var when running the following line: Console.WriteLine(var.GetType().Name…

Optimize the following code: Answer A simple optimization is to replace Count() with Length. Count() is an extension method that looks…

While working on Tiler I experimented with the new options in Visual Studio 2012 for doing Test Driven Development. I have to say I’m…

What is the result of the following code? The result is:  When the compiler chooses the overload, all functions that are declared in the…

What will be the output of the following code? Most of us will expect to see the numbers 0 to 9 but in reality this code prints out ten…

There are many reasons why users find it harder to use a website on a mobile phone then on a desktop: Slower connection (Most of the time…

For developing Tiler I choose Windows 8 as OS. I’ve installed it on a separate partition on my personal pc so I could use Hyper-V for…

Today I was working on rewriting a complex AJAX page to use KnockoutJS and I used the new Visual Studio 11 editor for it. There are some big…

What is the value of i2? Why doesn’t the line with i1 compile? How can you prevent this kind of errors? Answer The value of i2 = –214748363…

Since Microsoft is working hard on releasing a bunch of new technologies and tools, I started looking for a new hobby project to test a…

Why does Foo throw an exception? Answer int? is a nullable type. T t = new T(); returns a Nullable with a value of null. If we have a…

Question two in our TechQuiz is about Unit Testing. What do you think is an advantage of Unit Testing? What is the biggest problem you…

Inside VincisAqtion we’ve started with a little TechQuiz. We’re planning on  creating weekly questions to publish them on our intranet and…

This blog is a translation of my article that’s published by the Dutch Microsoft .NET Magazine (http://www.dotnetmag.nl/Artikel/2683/Unit…