Programming my life away
Many of my customers are still using Azure DevOps. We’ve talked about moving their code to GitHub to take advantage of newer agentic capabilities, but for a lot of teams that move just isn’t possible right now. What does this mean for them? They’re missing out on the excellent GitHub Copilot code review experience. That didn’t sit right with me. Teams on Azure DevOps deserve the same level of…
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with customers lately about how to improve governance around MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers when using AI-powered development tools like GitHub Copilot. Right now, most organizations fall into one of two camps: Neither approach is ideal. Why? One, disabling all of them limits the power of the AI-powered development tools. Two, with having everything…
I ve recently been seeing a lot of developers diving into the world of authentication and asking for recommendations on what to use as an Identity Provider (IdP). There s plenty of IdP out there. If you ve been following me, I ve done some posts on Identity Server (before it was Duende). I m a big fan of Microsoft Entra (for the workforce) and Entra External ID (successor of Azure AD B2C), for…
So you ve been eager to deploy your containerized web application that you ve been working on for a while, to Azure App Service. You follow the best security practices which means you ve setup your connection to your Azure SQL database using a managed identity. Upon loading your application, you get a dreadful exception that you can t connect to the database. You then wonder, is this a database…
My customers have been excited to start using and experimenting with GitHub Copilot. Their proof of value has really proven to be beneficial in a lot of their development aspects. Some of them have tougher security controls in their corporate environments. One of them is SSL inspection through their firewall/NVA. This had lead to the dreadful error: [CopilotClientManager Information]…
I ve been working with more customers that are starting to take testing (unit, integration, end to end and load testing) more seriously. You may ask, Dom, really? I thought testing was trivial . Unfortunately not. As we re entering an era where businesses are producing software like never before, relatively speaking, these businesses are not software companies. They are seeking to prioritize the…
As you all know, .NET Core 3.1 is now out of support since December 13 2022. If you follow me on my social media, I reminded my followers about this a little over a month ago. Unfortunately, some of the customers my colleagues and I deal with, have yet to migrate, and were caught by surprise at the last minute. I am and have been advising my customers to plan some time to migrate to .NET 6 (which…
I was searching for what was available in terms of encryption for SQLite and stumbled upon the Microsoft SQLite documentation for encryption. It states SQLite doesn t support encrypting database files by default. Instead, you need to use a modified version of SQLite like SEE, SQLCipher, SQLiteCrypt, or wxSQLite3. I looked at all the proposed products and saw that SQLCipher was giving a community…
I got a YubiKey recently and saw a YouTube video where the presenter quickly showed how to sign GitHub commits. I found this a useful thing, as on GitHub, you can just set your name and email in your git config and GitHub will link that it s from you but when in fact it may not. I saw this with Linus Torvalds, where someone saw he had made commits on a repo, but it did not seem to be something he…
It may happen that you want to test some C# code without having to start the full car, i.e. open up Visual Studio or Visual Studio code. You may even want to test some of the libraries you re developing to see how a scenario or behavior you are thinking about would react. Say no more. In this post, I will show you 2 ways to do so. It won t require you to create a console app or even run your…
In the organization I currently am, on a specific projet, the GIT repository is pretty beefy and large. I had not updated the development branch in a while, due to my assignation on some other projects. Once I had some time to come back to work on this project and see where the team was in terms of code, I wanted to make sure my local development branch was up to date with the remote by pulling…
I ve been working with my team on refactoring the authentication process that has been put in place in the application I am working on. One of the requirements was that we wanted to test out what happens when the user sees the user consentement (that is that the user consents the application to access data on its behalf), but also, when we do not see the user consentement. To my demise, finding…
If you have been following Microsoft Build 2021, you may have seen the news that the CosmosDB linux container is now out. This is great news for the ones who finally want to test on a *nix environment. As of this post, the CosmosDB linux container is in preview. As stated in the documentation, there are some limitations: Today, I will show you how you can automate the CosmosDB container for your…
I recently was playing around with the localhost SSL certificate that is used with Kestrel when developing locally. After cleaning my certificate using dotnet dev-certs https --clean and then retrusting it through dotnet dev-certs https --trust, my browser kept telling me my certificate was expired. Adding more log to my application, it was telling me it was using a certificate with thumbnail X…
I ve recently came across a news from Microsoft stating that they will remove the free grant for hosted agents: I love hosted agents as they include all the tools, I can possibly use, for me to build any possible software. For new comers, who want to have an Azure DevOps organization that can leverage hosted agents, which include concurrent pipelines, having this limitation is a bummer. Going…