Testing locally with Fiddler

Fiddler is awesome when it comes debugging HTTP on your local machine. It can intercept HTTP requests and responses and has a very powerful IDE that adds a lot of extra advanced features that can help you monitor and troubleshoot your HTTP calls. However, one thing that is tricky with Fiddler is the fact that for Fiddler to intercept any calls made to a locally running/installed API, you need to use a custom URL => http://ipv4.fiddler/<yourAPIEndpoint> If you have unit tests or you're trying to debug your code, you have to constantly change your …[read more]

Code comments - taking a closer look

Should I use comments in my code? This is probably one of the most debated subjects in software development it's been going for a while. There are developers that insist on commenting everything under the sun and then some. You've seen code like this before, where there is a sea of green (if you're working in Visual Studio) and sometimes the comments may even outnumber the actual code. On the other hand, you have that prefer to leave the code totally undocumented. No green insight, anywhere! But no way to decipher the code either. So what is the best practice …[read more]

Guess who's attending and speaking at ./NET/Fringe?

./NET/Fringe is almost upon us (12-14 April 2015) and I've been monitoring with envy as the organisers announced the line up a few weeks ago. This new event is a proper celebration of two worlds that used to be so different not until long ago - .NET and Open Source. To understand why .NET/Fringe is so exciting let me quote the description directly from the .NET/Fringe website: .NET Fringe is a new conference focused on .NET developers who are breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries. The .NET platform is more interesting today than it ever has …[read more]

DevWeek 2015 London – Retrospect

This year, I was fortunate enough to be selected as a speaker for DevWeek 2015 in London. In case you haven’t had the chance to attend or is the first time you hear of this conference, then I would highly recommend you make it your goal to be attend next year. DevWeek is the UK’s leading developer conference with over 100 breakout sessions and 23 full day workshops. The amount of information and knowledge you can accumulate in 5 days is immense and you will, most likely, leave the conference with some great ideas and a buzz about …[read more]

Resolving Kestrel issues for ASP.NET 5 on Mac OSx

Running ASP.NET 5 on a Mac is so refreshing! Is it? Really? Well, yes and no. Yes, if you like experimenting and fiddling with the file system, using experimental software and enjoy troubleshooting a lot. It is not a great experience if you expect things to work straight out of the box and you don't want to mess around with the setup and environment configuration. This post is about a couple of this things that I stumbled across a few times while developing and testing ASP.NET on my Mac. Kestrel,in case you haven't used it before, is …[read more]

Using PowerShell to resolve Host names to IP address

Today's post is to be a quick one, more like a useful DevOps tip. Today, I was given a list of hosts that I had to resolve to IP addresses in order to add them to a config file. Obviously there are a few ways to do this, but I wanted to automate it because you never know when someone will request something similar. Powershell to the rescue then. The script is pretty simple and I bet that it can be condenced even more, but I like my code and scripts as readable as possible. It is handy to remember …[read more]

Azure Key Vault - the new security service from Microsoft

Azure Key Vault is a new(ish) service offered by the Azure team. This Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature, now in general availability(GA), allows you to securely manage and protect cryptographic keys and secrets which can be used by cloud-enabled applications and services. There are 2 compelling reasons why someone may choose to use Azure Key Vault: It can be used to encrypt keys and secrets (authorisation keys, storage account keys, data encryption keys, etc) using the keys that are stored within the Azure Key Vault service and are protected by Hardware Security Modules (HMS). Alternatively, the stored keys can be …[read more]

Getting started with TypeScript and Sublime Text

UPDATED: This post has been rewritten around the official TypeScript plugin [Typescript](http://www.typescriptlang.org/" target="_blank) is awesome, period. TypeScript, in case you don't know, is a superset of JavaScript that allows you to use Object Oriented principles in order to write code that can be compiled to JavaScript. In effect, you can use optional static typing, modules, interfaces and classes to write your code and once the code is compiled, the end result is an idiomatic javascript code that resembles the code that you would directly javascript if you wanted to create classes etc without …[read more]