I just returned from SQLBits 2016 and had a fantastic time. They really put on a great conference, with brilliant speakers on a variety of SQL topics (and increasingly NoSQL/Big Data). Throw in good catering and an amazing , all for a very reasonable price and you have a conference I really can't recommend enough! The talk that excited me most this year was...

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...

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...

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...

This is Part 4 is my series on using Gulp with Visual Studio. So far we've covered setting up Visual Studio for use with Gulp, processing SASS, and getting the files ready for deployment. Part 1: Setting up Gulp with Visual Studio Part 2: Getting SASSy Part 3: Deployment: minification and concatenation Part 4: Code quality: tests and linting Part 5: Thoughts on Gulp In...

In my previous blog I wrote about how we can use Gulp to compile SASS. This time it's all about how we can use Gulp in Visual Studio to prepare files for a release by minifying and concatenating them. I've put up a project using the standard MVC 5 template for this series of posts here Part 1: Setting up...

Getting SASSy with Gulp in Visual Studio In my previous blog I showed you how to set up Visual Studio for use with Gulp. Now I want to show you how you can use it in everyday development, including processing SASS, running tests, linting your code and getting ready for deployment. In this series of posts I'll talk about how you...

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...

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...

In the last few years a rich set of front end development tools has emerged for building complex web applications. Gulp in particular has taken off in a huge way. However, .NET development is lagging when it comes to adoption of these tools. This is all set to change, especially with the release of ASP.NET 5 where Gulp will become part of the standard...

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...

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...