Software 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.

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.

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)

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

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

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).

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.

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.