Apr
13
2016
Entry Point Logging allows you to track all your API calls and the calls they make from a single place
In the first part of this series I gave a brief overview of Serilog and Seq and what differentiates them from logging you may have done in the past. One of the most useful aspects of structured logging is the...
Apr
12
2016
Add structure to your log entries and bring your logs up to date
It used to be that logging was a bit of an after thought where a few statements such as 'Connecting to the database' or 'Invalid user login' were written to a text file that was rarely looked at. Well things have moved on a fair bit since then.
Part 1...
Apr
11
2016
Standardise your basic user data and add it to your ClaimsPrincipal for easy access!
Recently I was working on a web api 2.0 project that used a bearer token for authentication and passed a UserId in the claims for the generated ClaimsPrincipal.
Each controller in the project was accessing the User property from the ApiController base class to get the UserId...
Aug
25
2015
Fluent Builders are extremely useful. Once you start using them there is no going back!
In my first article I outlined fluent builders - what they look like and how to put them together. This time I will go a little deeper to show you just how versatile they can be.
Method Naming
You can be as flexible as you like in...
Aug
18
2015
If you need to add 'Percent of Total' to your charts in Power BI, here's how..
Microsoft's Power BI is excellent. It is so easy to get up and running with data coming from a multitude of places. Out of the box you can easily show facts and figures related to your data. One thing it currently misses though is...
Aug
05
2015
When creating tests (for TDD or BDD), use fluent builders
No, I don't mean the kind that come around and drink all your coffee / tea. When you are testing your code you often have to initialise various classes beforehand. There are several ways to do this. Consider this simple api that takes in a 'Booking' object and returns the...
Aug
01
2015
Searching the web there are plenty of articles about Visual Studio 2015 and all that it brings with it, but you may have to dig down to get to some of the new features that will be instantly of help in your everyday activities. Here are the five lesser known ones that most interest me...
Debugging Lambda expressions
This has been...
Jul
20
2015
With Visual Studio 2015 comes C# 6.0. The team at Microsoft put a whole lot of effort into the Roslyn compiler this time around and the language features are primarily syntactic sugar, but they are still extremely welcome.
The Null-Conditional Operator
Here is a small piece of code that I inherited recently. It has a very simple task, get the client's...
Jul
02
2015
Lately we have created several data marts in Azure SQL that will be fed from a data warehouse hosted on premises. The data mart is first created and tested locally so that we can get the structure and required stored procs correct. Whilst we are doing this it is easy to quickly transfer representative data to test the efficiency. Every...
Sep
15
2014
Quite often when creating a database you will need tables of static data. These range from simple lookups to date dimensions in a data warehouse. You can easily create these in an SSDT project.Presuming you have already designed your tables and they are present in your project;Create a folder in your project called StaticData then add a sql script...
Sep
09
2014
If you are creating a sql server project with SSDT (see here) and your sql refers to another database you will need to add a database reference to allow the project to build. You can do this by right clicking your references folder and selecting 'Add Database Reference'
If the database you are referring to is also a part of the...
Aug
01
2014
Database DevOps - SSDT and TeamCityUsing Visual Studio and SSDT you can immediately publish a fresh database or update an existing one by simply right clicking the database project and choosing 'Publish'. This will bring up a dialog that lets you edit the connection string to your database and set various options related to the publish.At this point you have a choice...
View Darren Hall's profile