Posts on Richard Borges

Using Playwright

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At the recent dotNetConf 2021, amongst all the other goodies released and presented ( .NET 6 ; VS2022 ), there was a session covering Testing tools for .NET.

One in particular caught my eye. Playwright

This one merits further investigation.

Testing Tools for .NET and cross-platform apps

https://playwright.dev/dotnet/

Azure SQL performance tuning

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After recently migrating an application from on-premises to Azure, I have been keeping a close eye on its performance.

The application uses Azure SQL. The Azure portal puts forth recommendations to tune the database e.g. create new indices or drop duplicates. That works well.

However I found another SQL query, which provides more recommendations

This site ‘Tune your database’ Tune applications and databases for performance in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance provided some useful guidance.

PowerShell prompt

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Previously I had tried to install oh-my-posh prompts and folder icons. It never quite worked for me and I kept trying to fix it on and off.

When Scott Hanselman posted about it (again) in Aug, I had to have a look.

However even this time around, I did not get it 100% correct. Could be my profile file was corrupted. I did try a few things ( uninstalling the fonts, recreating my profile ), however things did not improve.

Automated UI testing

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Finally got around to using Playwright - a tool for UI testing. The official documentation is here https://playwright.dev/ .

I am using C# and Microsoft has a nuget package. I also wanted to use it in a NUnit project.

The two sites that helped me get started were :

Create a new NUnit project in VS2019 (make sure you use .NET 5 and above). Add the Playwright NuGet package.

Increasing Productivity

Sun, 30 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since early this year I been reading up on, continuing to improve on how I stay motivated and increase my productivity. This is what is working for me:

The book Getting Results the Agile Way. Reading this book and following the J.D.Meier’s advice has been a big plus on how I get things done on a daily, weekly and more, basis. In addition to setting a goal for 3 things for the day, 3 things for the week and so on, I have been keeping a focus on these ‘hot’ areas:

Terminal Icons

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have used Scott Hanselman’s tips in the past regarding setting up Windows Terminal and then updating to newer fonts.

He recently publised a post about using terminal icons . I think they look great.

I had a small hiccup where my icons were not displaying correctly. A search on Stackoverflow got me here How to get @DevBlackOps Terminal-Icons module working in PowerShell on Windows

Working remote

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Its been over 12 months since I have been working remotely. I have been interested in working remotely (Working from home WFH) for some time. I would try to WFH a day here and there, but not consistently.

After about 3 weeks of being asked to WFH ( due to the coronavirus restrictions) I had to make a few adjustments to make me productive. I already had a place in my study with a decent work table and chair. The new additions were :

Jekyll to Hugo

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This blog richardborges.net, has been running on GitHub (and Jekyll) since July 2018.

As the number of posts increased, I felt the need for a search feature. Elasticsearch is one of my favourite tools, but that would be an overkill for this static site. I wanted something small and easy.

I have been following Jeremy Likness for a while and was quite impressed by his journey, migrating from “Medium” to “Hugo”. In particular Dynamic Search in a Static Hugo Website - Jeremy Likness.

Microsoft's 30 days to learn it

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Here is an opportunity to learn new skills in 30 days, investing about an hour a day (give or take a few week ends)

Microsoft 30 days learn

I am planning to invest time in these three:

DevOps Engineer

Design and implement DevOps processes and practices.
Develop an instrumentation strategy with logging, telemetry, and monitoring.
Manage source control with GitHub to foster collaboration and automate build and deployment processes.

Azure Developer

What's the holdup ?

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So. Its been a while since my last post. I really should make, posting at regular intervals, a habit. What’s my comfortable cadence? I’ll try a few things to find what suits me best.

I’ve been following/reading Scott Galloway, some thought provoking insights on life, relationships and wealth

and listening to Scott Hanselman podcasts, especially this one, where Scott says

… I blog twice a week consistently for 20 years. And I podcast every Thursday for the last 15 years, 14 years. And the reason that that works is that I’m not doing it five days a week..

Underlying provider failed on open

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was working on a Web App which uses a SQL database and EntityFramework. The app is hosted in Azure. I spent some time fixing up the csproj file so that the build and release pipelines work correctly i.e. once the code is committed to the repository, a build is kicked off and deployment takes place.

So far so good. However on visiting the site I see this error:

Error : The underlying provider failed on Open. Stack Trace : at System.Data.Entity.Core.EntityClient.EntityConnection.Open() at System.Data.Entity.Core.Objects.ObjectContext.EnsureConnection(Boolean shouldMonitorTransactions)

Epic year

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

New Year’s resolutions don’t always seem to stick, when you visit them in February. So this year I’ve waited till the end of January to make mine. I was inspired by this post The Ultimate Guide to your best year ever which breaks it down real nice. Here are a few gems:

decide this will be your best year…ever. Will you do your life’s work (programming) starting this year?
adopt a growth mindset, adopt an abundance mindset, adopt a mastery mindset
“Who do you need to become, to be the kind of person you want to be?”
“Who do you want to be, and what experiences do you want to create?”
Word for the Year: Epic
Daily habits, set Goals and Inspired actions
A attitude of Gratitude
“Don’t Let Yesterday Take Up Too Much of Today” - Will Rogers

What a fantastic post, and it is written by none other than J.D.Meier of Getting Results the Agile Way fame. I purchased that one a while ago.

Keto

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

[Updated 14 Feb 2020] In addition to weight loss and mental clarity, some people have reported being able to reverse type 2 diabetes with a keto lifestyle. My personal benefits have been:

higher energy levels
mental clarity

I have been on this journey since Aug 2016 and have benefitted from non-scale victories.

To get started with keto [a low carbohydrate high fat diet], begin by listening to this podcast Getting started. There are over a hundred episodes in this podcast, so take your time and at a minimum, listen to the first 13.

Using VS Code for editing and publishing

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For a while, I have been using the Windows bash shell to run the blog locally while I edit and then used the bash shell to commit my changes to Github. I’ve now started using VS Code to edit and deploy my blog, all from VS Code. How do I do this?

Launch VS Code ( Visual Studio Code) and open up the folder of the blog e.g. D:\RichardBorges.github.io
In the terminal window ( in VSCode ) ensure that you have a wsl terminal ( Windows Subsystem for Linux). I’m running Windows 10, i.e. a Windows bash shell. Read more here
Type

bundle exec jekyll serve

in the terminal window and this will build and launch the site locally at http://127.0.0.1:4000.

Azure Devops Templates

Sat, 25 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On my DevOps learning journey, I came across this useful resource azuredevopsdemogenerator containing templates with pre-made build and release pipelines. Once the selected project is loaded into your Azure Devops organisation ( I created my own personal organisation there, separate from the work one, as a sandbox in Azure Devops) you can see the prepopulated Boards, Pipelines, Repos etc. You can now build and deploy to your own instance. Bonus: They even have a Parts Unlimited package of ‘The Phoenix Project’ fame. So if you have read the book, this makes it real. Nice.

DevOps Thriller

Sun, 12 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Who would have thought DevOps could be so interesting? I read a version of this about 5 years ago and recently found that there is a Kindle version avaialble. The book is

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Kindle Edition

by Gene Kim (Author), Kevin Behr (Author), George Spafford (Author)

A wonderful read and very relatable.

Disk cloning software

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Macrium Reflect Free Edition to clone an existing disk

This helped me immensely, when I added an additional 1TB SSD to my rig.

Elasticsearch upgrade

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

These are my notes on upgrading elasticseach from v5.3 to v6.4.2. This was done on Windows Server 2016 with 32GB RAM and 500GB hdd. The source data was about 300GB in size.

Steps

Download elasticsearch + kibana from downloads. After extracting to my local drive, I used NSSM to run these as windows services. You should now be able to visit http://localhost:9200 (elasticsearch) and http://localhost:5601 ( kibana )
Copy across the 5.3 data using robcopy. Install elasticsearch 5.3 ( update elasticsearch.yml ) to run 5.3 at http://localhost:8200 ( as 6.4.2 is running on port 9200)
Create the new indices on 6.4.2
Migrate the data from 5.3 to 6.4.2 using reindex

Additional resources

Upgrade Elasticsearch

NDC Sydney 2018

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Attended NDC sydney and quite enjoyed it. This is a 3 day conference held at the Hilton in Sydney CBD. They even organise a childrens coding camp before the start of the conference. Thats a nice touch.

Attended quite a few talks over the 3 days.

The sessions

The ones that stand out for me were

ASP.Net Core 2.1 - the out of the box benefits
Using Async-Await correctly in C#
Team culture ( e.g. no blame retrospectives )
React + GraphQL + Docker

Download binary data to file

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I had some binary data in a table in SQL and wanted to save it locally. The data was emails (msg files). I could have done this using powershell and the Invoke-SqlCmd commandlet, but for whatever reason, invoke-sqlcmd refused to work on my machine. After spending a few hours trying to get that to work, I gave up and jumped on stackoverflow to find another solution.

Linqpad to the rescue

I happened on this link Script to save varbinary data to disk which was just the solution I was looking for. Download LinqPad 5 (the free version is fine) and then

Learning react

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

To come to grips with react, I completing a few courses on react at PluralSight, which helped me get a better understanding of react.

I also found the facebook maintained react page worth a visit.

Create React App

Visit Create React App which contains step by step instructions.

Additional resources

I was trying to add a react component to an ASP.Net MVC page. This page The Minimal React + Webpack 4 + Babel Setup proved very helpful.

Moving from Wordpress to github pages

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

[updated] 13 Oct 2018

I was finally prodded into action when my wordpress blog site certificate expired.

Using a few excellent resources available on the interwebs, I was able to run (generate in jekyll) the site locally on a Windows 10 machine and then push it to github (richardborges.github.io), which hosts for free !

Running the site locally.

The main steps where 0. Make sure you have Bash on Ubuntu on Windows and have visited jekyll on Windows

Taking Electron for a spin

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to podcasts about electron apps at DotNetRocks (episode 1336 )

as well as Scott Hanselmans podcast Creating cross-platform Electron apps with Jessica Lord.Both are very informative. Jessica also has an interesting blog post at essential electron. So I picked up a course on Pluralsight by Rob Connery.

First impressions : using node server to create a desktop application was quite new to me and I had to get my head around having a node server running locally to serve up content in a chromium browser. All local.

Setting up CI with TeamCity

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I have used an Azure Virtual Machine (Win 2008 Server, standard DS1 1core-3.5GB memory) for this.

Download JetBrains TeamCity on the server. I planned to install both the server and the build agent on the one box. This will do for now. I will look at moving the build agent to another server if there is demand. Accepted the default settings during installation.

I wanted to connect to bitbucket to retrieve the latest source using SSH. I added a new user (called BuildUser) to Bitbucket and added an SSH public key (bit bucket has good documentation on creating SSH keys. I used my bash shell to create these for the BuildUser user). One gotcha was that the Username had to be ‘git’.

Third party UI controls - ASP.Net MVC 5

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The wonderful people at Syncfusion have offered a community license for free which gives you over 650+ controls. Head over here.

After a bit of fiddling using their online documentation, I’ve finally been able to use the chart control in my ASP.Net MVC5 code. The 3 main dlls , I needed of the chart control are (changes to the web.config):

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint linenums:1">&lt;assemblies&gt;
      &lt;add assembly="Syncfusion.EJ, Version=14.2460.0.26, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3d67ed1f87d44c89" /&gt;
      &lt;add assembly="Syncfusion.Linq.Base, Version=14.2460.0.26, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3d67ed1f87d44c89" /&gt;
      &lt;add assembly="Syncfusion.EJ.Mvc, Version=14.2500.0.26, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3d67ed1f87d44c89" /&gt;
&lt;/assemblies&gt;
</pre>

To get around a Visual Studio build error, I had to add the following to the web.config

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint linenums:1">&lt;dependentAssembly&gt;
     &lt;assemblyIdentity name="Syncfusion.EJ" culture="neutral" publicKeyToken="3d67ed1f87d44c89" /&gt;
     &lt;bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-14.2460.0.26" newVersion="14.2460.0.26" /&gt;
&lt;/dependentAssembly&gt;
&lt;dependentAssembly&gt;
    &lt;assemblyIdentity name="Syncfusion.Linq.Base" culture="neutral" publicKeyToken="3d67ed1f87d44c89" /&gt;
    &lt;bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-14.2460.0.26" newVersion="14.2460.0.26" /&gt;
&lt;/dependentAssembly&gt;
</pre>

And lastly one javascript library, ej.widgets.all.min (8,466 kb), which after using their tool csg, � (for the chart control only) reduced it to (ej.chart.min.js) 909kb.

In _layout.cshtml, added:

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint linenums:1">&lt;script src="~/Scripts/ej/ej.chart.min.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;    
@RenderSection("scripts", required: false)    
@Html.EJ().ScriptManager()
</pre>

and in viewname.cshtml, added

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint linenums:1">@(Html.EJ().Chart("presentationReport"))
</pre>

My Setup and Tools - July 2016

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here is my development setup list of tools.

VS 2015 community edition
Jet Brains Resharper ( paid )
Productivity Power Tools 2015 (free plugin to VS2015)
Web Essentials 2015.5 (free plugin for VS2015)
automapper.org
bootbox.js make your pop-over front and centre. Bootbox.js is a small JavaScript library which allows you to create programmatic dialog boxes using Bootstrap modals, without having to worry about creating, managing or removing any of the required DOM elements or JS event handlers.
animate.css for nice bouncy effects
Templating engine underscore.js
momentjs.com moment.js library to format date time in javascript
Less to css or use http://css2less.co for legacy css to less conversion (makes my css� code clearner in my VS project).
Bootstrap , input group , components -> search button to the right of the text box
Organize your javascript library http://requirejs.org
Dependency Injection library: NinJect.MVC5 ver: 3.2.1.0
Use convention over configuration PM>install-package Ninject.extensions.conventions
Unit Testing tools (add to Test project): Moq PM> install-package moq -version:4.2.1510.2205
Unit Testing tools (add to Test project): FluentAssertions PM> install-package FluentAssertions -version:3.3.0
Unit Testing a repository. google.com.au search for ‘mock dbset’ to get code from MSDN. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn314429.aspx. Use that code to populate my DBSet for testing.
Integration Test: (Integration Test project) use nUnit because it has a feature to initialization databases that MSTest does not have.
PM> install-package nunit -version:2.6.3
DotCover by JetBrains - to find how much of our code is covered by our tests

Testing Testing - where is my database?

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently while creating a unit test (MSTest VS2015) to test my repository pattern, I hit a snag. Despite having defined the database in my app.config of the Test project, I could not locate my newly created database.

Turns out I needed to initialise my db in the test class , like so:

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint linenums:1">// Declare this property - this is set by MSTest
 public TestContext TestContext { get; set; }

 // In test initialization 
 [ClassInitialize]
 public static void SetUp(TestContext context)
 {
 AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetData("DataDirectory", Path.Combine(context.TestDeploymentDir, string.Empty));
 }</pre>

Saw this useful tip at Stackoverflow, which also talks about the differences between sdf (Server Explorer does not show table schema) and mdf (Server Explorer displays table schema).

DDD Sydney 2016

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m attending 🙂

DDD Sydney

[Update] DDD Sydney was fun. Quite a bit of learning , caught up with old friends and met new people. The organiser Aaron Powell has written about this experience with organising DDD Sydney.

what3words.com : an interesting take on finding a location

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

what3words.com

From their website

what3words is a global grid of 57 trillion 3mx3m squares. Each square has a 3 word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity.� Our geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses and vice-versa.� Using words means non-technical people can accurately find any location and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links. e.g. gazed.across.like

Open source diagnostics platform of the web

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I used getglimpse to have a look at diagnostics information. Its available as a NuGet package. Helpful information in addition to using F12 and other tools.

Using SignalR to stream performance data

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I am still coming to grips with the power of SignalR. In this demo (from PluralSight.com “ASP.NET MVC 5 Fundamentals ” by Scott Allen), performance monitoring data is streamed to a browser client. SignalR is used in ASP.Net with MVC5. In this case windows authentication was used to authenticate the user on the client (understandably so). http://smoothiecharts.org/ javascript was used to display the graphs. All very nice.

Getting deeper into C# and Akka.net

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Been reading the wonderful tips and tricks in C# by Jason Roberts , bought to you by LeanPub .

Also created a web project using signalR and Akka.net following the Jason Roberts course in Pluralsight. SignalR takes care of the communications between the (browser) client and (web) server, while Akka.net takes care of the (heavy) message processing. All very fascinating and works well under load.

Supplying credentials for an API call

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

For testing APIs, I use a tool called Postman. Its free and available on the Chrome Webstore. Install and launch the app. To test an api call which requires authentication, turn on the Interceptor in Postman

This will prompt for a plugin to be installed in Chrome.

Once you do that, login to your application in Chrome. The login credentials will be passed on to Postman and you can proceed with the API call testing.

How I went from http to https

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

From http to https.

Today I went from here (http):

to (https:)

Thanks to Troy Hunt in providing the instructions. That post was written in Sep 2013. I had to conduct a few trial and errors to get https working for my site.

Background:

My blog ( richardborges.net ) is hosted on Azure site (richardborgesblog.azurewebsites.net). I have pointed richardborgesblog.azurewebsites.net to richardborges.net. Visit the excellent PluralSight course by Troy Hunt on how to do this.

SSL certificate for an Azure website

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Troy Hunt very informative article on how to load a free SSL certificate onto your Azure website. Thank you Troy. Written in 2013, but still relevant.

Year 2016

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Get Stuff Done !

Got a whole lot of “to-dos” on my plate, covering : personal development, career growth, fulfilling some long outstanding dreams. amongst others. How exciting. Its going to be fun.

Frameworks for .Net Web developers

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

With all the different frameworks to be found for Web development, I came across this top-must-know-frameworks-for-net-web-developers (Ugo Lattanzi), by Ugo Lattanzi, which offers a good summary. The ASP.MVC link therein links on to free PluralSight courses. Good learning. BTW I have re-newed with Pluralsight. Great value for money IMHO.

Team Leadership

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Reading about Roy Osherove’’s views on Development Team Leadership. Quite interesting.

What else is new today?

Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by ASP.Net MVC, Silicon Beach Sydney, Udemy and Guitar Online!

Microsoft 30 days learn

Also this speech by Tim Minchin UWA Address (2013) - YouTube