Software Development Posts
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June 23, 2025Scott DePouw
Git’s pretty great. It’s very configurable and customizable. One of the many options it offers is telling Git who you are when you make a commit. Providing a…
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May 29, 2025Sarah Dutkiewicz
Have you ever wondered what is going on when you click that “Sign in with… ” button? What is authentication and authorization? How does OAuth tie into this? I…
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May 22, 2025Scott DePouw
This month I broke my non-conference-attendance streak of 10 years and returned to Stir Trek for their 2025 conference. I attended live sessions concerning…
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April 29, 2025Sarah Dutkiewicz
Recently, I decided to tackle a homemade red velvet cake with Ermine frosting for my older son’s birthday. He asked that I’d bake him the cake as a special…
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April 24, 2025Scott DePouw
Code quality analysis comes in all shapes and sizes. From empirical measurements to heated discussions, expressions of code quality can vary from team to team…
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March 19, 2025NimblePros Named a Particular Software Partner for Expertise in NServiceBus We’re excited to announce that NimblePros has been officially recognized as a…
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March 17, 2025Let’s settle this once and for all: AutoMapper isn’t evil, and the ‘just write the mapping code by hand’ crowd isn’t crazy either. After a decade of watching…
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March 10, 2025Scott DePouw
I’ve recently been working on an application with basic ASP.NET Core identity. We’ve generated the necessary SQL tables via EntityFramework migrations…
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February 18, 2025Scott DePouw
C#, like most programming languages, has a plethora of features and functionality that would take a long time to fully encompass. I’ve been using C…
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January 27, 2025Sarah Dutkiewicz
Over on Bluesky, we’ve started adding a Question of the Week that comes up during the beginning of the week. I’m picking questions that are related to the…
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January 20, 2025Scott DePouw
The out-of-the-box method of performing assertions in unit tests works well, but there are better, more fluid ways of writing assertions. Rather than writing…
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December 19, 2024Kyle McMaster
This blog post is part of the 2024 C# Advent Calendar. Thanks to Matt Groves for organizing this awesome collection of knowledge and festivities. I’d also like…
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December 09, 2024Scott DePouw
Yes, it is in fact possible to test randomness within your application! Like with so many other facets of your code, it’s important too. Whether you’re making a…
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December 02, 2024This post is part of the Festive Tech Calendar 2024 adventures. Just as holiday cookie recipes give you tried-and-true methods for festive treats, design…
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November 26, 2024Sarah Dutkiewicz
LINQ (Language Integrated Query) has always been a game-changer for .NET developers, streamlining data manipulation with elegance and efficiency. With .NET…
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November 21, 2024Occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting to query data from a database. I know I do! Sometimes that involves grouping your data. Sometimes you want to group…
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November 08, 2024So you’ve been through part 2 : Scaling the Monolith, and you’re still thinking microservices might be the right answer? OK, Let’s talk it out… Part 3 - Moving…
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October 31, 2024Welcome back to this series on architecting applications and systems with scaling in mind. In Part 2 of this series, we are going to take the sliced/modular…
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October 30, 2024Sarah Dutkiewicz
In our webinar on “Common Antipatterns and Refactorings”, I mentioned loops could sometimes be seen as antipatterns. Some people were concerned because loops…
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October 29, 2024I was working with another developer the other day, using C# records. When using a record, you may have seen syntax similar to primary constructors to declare…
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September 27, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is part of a series on NServiceBus. In the past couple articles, we created a saga that tries to verify a contributor’s phone number and marks them…
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September 25, 2024Welcome to the series “Architecting to Scale”. In this series we are going to look at an iterative approach to scaling your applications, whether as a ‘monolith…
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September 24, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is part of a series on NServiceBus. In the previous article, we created our first saga. In this article, we will introduce the concept of timeouts and…
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September 09, 2024For a long time, I’ve been used to creating regular expressions in C# like this: I declare it because I know it’ll never change or require any dynamic values…
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August 30, 2024This post is part of a series on NServiceBus. In this article, we will implement the happy path of our example saga introduced in the previous article. In this…
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August 26, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is part of a series on NServiceBus. In the previous articles, we looked at fundamental concepts for messaging and how to get started with NServiceBus…
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August 20, 2024Scott DePouw
This is part of my blog post series on AutoMapper. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 The series returns! Part 5 of my AutoMapper series is brought to you today thanks…
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August 09, 2024Kevin Lloyd
Introduction Unit Testing is easy on greenfield but hard on legacy code. You’ve gone through the initial steps of extracting the troublesome dependencies for…
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July 16, 2024Scott DePouw
Consulting remotely for multiple clients presents many unique challenges not seen in other areas of software development. Within the scope of things probably…
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June 17, 2024.NET’s abstraction finally absolves us of the need to wrap and friends with a custom interface. I’ve used it a lot for my date/time abstraction needs and have…
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May 13, 2024You’re being responsible! You want to ensure that merges into your stable source control branch are safe, so you gate any merges with a build, establishing…
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April 16, 2024Dependencies on external resources can make code difficult to test or maintain. This is hardly a hot take. Recently, a user in the devBetter Discord server had…
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April 15, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is the fourth in a series on NServiceBus, a popular messaging framework for building distributed systems. If you’ve missed any of the previous…
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April 09, 2024Sarah Dutkiewicz
In my last post, I wrote about wanting to run my web projects and tests in one terminal window and how I achieved it using DotnetBackground. We received this…
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April 05, 2024Sarah Dutkiewicz
Picture this - you’re working on a .NET website and want to run front-end tests against that site. What happens when you want to run tests against the sites…
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March 28, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is the third in a series on NServiceBus, a popular messaging framework for building distributed systems. In the previous post, we covered the basics…
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March 25, 2024Scott DePouw
Pull requests, or PRs, are a functional requirement in any cooperative development environment (and single development environment, in my humble opinion). They…
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March 13, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is the second in a series on NServiceBus. In the previous article, we looked at What is NServiceBus. In this article, we will look at how to get…
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March 07, 2024Kyle McMaster
This post is the beginning of a series focused on NServiceBus which aims to provide an overview of the framework and its ecosystem. We’ll start this series with…
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February 19, 2024Scott DePouw
Every now and then I need to do some math in my code, for some required business logic rule or other purpose. As an easy example, let’s apply a discount to a…
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February 19, 2024Kyle McMaster
In today’s increasingly complex world of software development, asynchronous messaging has become a fundamental architectural principle when building service…
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February 14, 2024Fati Iseni
Recently someone asked: A simple question. I have a set of tasks to perform and I want to optimize their performance. Basically reading a file and writing to a…
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February 14, 2024Sarah Dutkiewicz
After seeing Steve pairing with ChatGPT, I’ve been pairing with my friends ChatGPT and Bard Gemini to help me get past writer’s block. This morning, I prompted…
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February 14, 2024Kyle McMaster
This article is part of a series on leveling up your testing skills Creating Test Objects via Design Patterns Supercharging Your Test Data With AutoFixture…
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February 08, 2024Analyzing Your SQL Server Database: A Guide to Extracting Key Metrics with SQL Queries Introduction As a software developer or database administrator…
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January 25, 2024Scott DePouw
Lately I’ve been tinkering with game development. It’s an aspect of software development that isn’t part of my job and I’ve always had a hankering to produce a…
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December 19, 2023Scott DePouw
Refit exposes several settings and options. One such option enables the ability to add bearer tokens (any headers, really) to outgoing requests. To get this…
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December 12, 2023Kyle McMaster
This article is part of a series on leveling up your testing skills Creating Test Objects via Design Patterns Supercharging Your Test Data With AutoFixture…
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December 11, 2023Scott DePouw
When we got started with Refit in my previous post I left a question open: If we wanted detailed information on HTTP traffic in Refit, how would we go about it…
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December 08, 2023Steve Smith
This article is part of the 2023 C# Christmas Calendar available here! Primary Constructors Last month, C# 12 introduced a new feature called Primary…
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December 05, 2023Scott DePouw
There are lots of ways to work with in .NET. When working with external APIs, I’ve recently discovered a rather useful mechanism that lets me set up a named…
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December 01, 2023Kyle McMaster
This article is part of a series on leveling up your testing skills Creating Test Objects via Design Patterns Supercharging Your Test Data With AutoFixture…
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November 29, 2023If you’re like me, you’ve needed to test business logic surrounding the current time. You’ve probably run into the classic case of having a embedded directly…
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October 27, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
This article is part of a series on leveling up your testing skills Creating Test Objects via Design Patterns Supercharging Your Test Data With AutoFixture…
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August 17, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
As you move from Moq to NSubstitute, you may wonder how they differ code-wise. In a recent lunch-n-learn discussion, Scott DePouw walked us through how the code…
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August 04, 2023In an ever-evolving digital landscape, businesses large and small often face challenges keeping pace with technological advancements. Sometimes, the gap between…
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July 10, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
We help some of our clients with migrating from .NET Framework to .NET Core apps. The .NET Upgrade Assistant can assist in the transition. One of the approaches…
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June 09, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
Have you checked in code that’s misaligned and not formatted cleanly? Have you checked in code with broken tests? What if there was a way that you could have a…
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June 07, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
Have you ever looked at code and felt overwhelmed by the inconsistencies in curly brace placement? Have you felt exhausted trying to follow the inconsistent…
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May 02, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
Note: This post is part of the SciFiDevCon 2023: May the Fourth Be With You event. Ardalis and Sadukie happen to be a part of the Stir Trek planning committee…
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April 14, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
If you are wanting to work with EF Core with Postgres, you may run into a problem where the casing of your tables may cause issues for running SQL queries…
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March 31, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
As March comes to an end, I wanted to feature someone in honor of Women’s History Month, one of the women behind the L of SOLID principles. Dr. Barbara Liskov…
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March 20, 2023Philippe Vaillancourt
LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a widely used feature in .NET, and it’s great to see that it’s still being built upon and modernized. Most of the changes…
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March 16, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
Naming things is hard, especially if there are multiple words that make up that name. Remembering names of naming conventions can also be hard. However…
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March 03, 2023Philippe Vaillancourt
Code coverage analysis is a useful tool for any developer looking to build high-quality, maintainable code. It helps identify gaps in your test coverage and…
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March 01, 2023Sarah Dutkiewicz
While I was looking at the Ardalis.GuardClauses repo, I noticed that the build process was failing. Talking with Steve, I noticed that the build was failing on…
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February 17, 2023Philippe Vaillancourt
In today’s digital age, having a website or a web application has become a necessity for businesses and individuals alike. But deploying a web application can…
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February 10, 2023Philippe Vaillancourt
In this quick tutorial, you will learn how to run and debug your application in Linux using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and Visual Studio Code. The…
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January 09, 2023Philippe Vaillancourt
Compression can be a useful tool for reducing the size of data transmitted over a network or stored on disk. The .NET framework includes several classes that…
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December 22, 2022Kyle McMaster
This post is part of the F# Advent Calendar 2022 hosted by Sergey Tihon. The goal of this post is to provide a glimpse into the journey of two C# developers…
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December 14, 2022Unit Testing Validation of Annotated Models It’s no secret that I like to unit test my code. The more I can decouple from dependencies and isolate, the faster I…
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December 12, 2022This is part of my blog post series on AutoMapper. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 This was something I stumbled across in my work lately, which spurred this unexpected…
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October 03, 2022Philippe Vaillancourt
In this article we’ll show how structs and classes have different behaviors when it comes to constructors and why you need to be careful when using a struct to…
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September 23, 2022Kyle McMaster
Fluent Assertions is a library used to make C# test code more readable and expressive. This frees your tests from syntax heavy assertion statements and allows…
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September 13, 2022Scott DePouw
This is the third part of my blog post series on AutoMapper. First part here! Second part here! AutoMapper Allows Self-Mappings Without Map Creation Typically …
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September 06, 2022Philippe Vaillancourt
I recently tried a code kata that Steve Smith posted in our devBetter Discord server. The kata is essentially a modelling exercise. The goal is to model a…
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August 23, 2022Philippe Vaillancourt
If you’re coming from another programming language like JavaScript, Rust or Go, you may be familiar with the function found in the standard library of those…
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August 23, 2022Philippe Vaillancourt
So you’ve set up some benchmarks for some performance critical piece of code in your application. Perhaps you’ve even followed along with my Benchmarking in…
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August 23, 2022Kyle McMaster
In the latest release of Ardalis.Result, a community requested feature was added to convert results from one type to another. This allows for flexible…
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August 18, 2022Philippe Vaillancourt
In this article I will show, step by step, how to set up a .NET benchmarking project. It is a cleaned up transcript from a video I made. We’re gonna start with…
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August 16, 2022Scott DePouw
This is the second part of my blog post series on AutoMapper. Check out the first part here! AutoMapper: A Very Testable Tool One of the many reasons I use…
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August 10, 2022Over the years, one of the tools I end up setting up / using / maintaining a lot has been AutoMapper. For the uninitiated, AutoMapper is a tool used to do a…
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August 09, 2022Steve Smith
ASP.NET Core has great support for automated integration testing. The docs provide everything you need to get started, and there are many community articles…
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July 13, 2022Kyle McMaster
I was recently going through the process of installing the developer tooling I use on a fresh, new laptop. I installed the usual suspects like Visual Studio and…
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May 26, 2022Kyle McMaster
Earlier this year Microsoft announced a new way to manage dependencies in .NET applications called Central Package Management. This new way of managing…
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May 13, 2022Kyle McMaster
Specification is a pattern in Domain Driven Design that helps encapsulate domain knowledge in a reusable way. The term Specification was coined by Martin Fowler…
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April 18, 2022Kyle McMaster
A result is an abstraction that allows developers to express the value as well as the outcome of an operation. A basic result can represent whether an operation…
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February 18, 2022Eric Fleming
Monitoring and Logging are critical pieces to the overall health and success of an application. Logging, which we’ll be specifically focusing on in this article…
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February 10, 2022Kyle McMaster
A Smart Enum is an enhancement of the C# enum that provides a strongly typed and object oriented approach to enum types. Smart Enums can be used when a enum…
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February 03, 2022Eric Fleming
In a previous article we covered Getting Started with Guard Clauses. We introduced what guard clauses were, when they should be used as well as the Ardalis…
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January 27, 2022Eric Fleming
A guard clause is a software pattern that simplifies complex functions by “failing fast”, checking for invalid inputs up front and immediately failing if any…
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January 25, 2022Steve Smith
Localization, the process of providing information in multiple languages as specified by the user, is a pretty common requirement for web apps. ASP.NET Core has…
