Blog 42

Upgrading Postgres Docker containers

This is a follow up to my old post from 2018: Upgrade Postgres Container to Version 10 In the meanwhile, I upgraded every year my Docker containers to the newest version of Postgres and realized, I can further optimize that process. But first, let's take a step back. Why not

C#

Async Processing Pipeline with Rx.Net

I was looking for the easiest way to process task asynchronously, but keep the order. However, implementing something on top of the BlockingCollection seemed a bit of an overkill. Simple async/await Instead, the original implementation was similar to: backgroundTasks.Add(LongProcessAsync()); And later on I could await all

Architecture

Testing your REST APIs end to end

I hope you agree, that testing your code is important. If you don't automate it, you'll need to do it manually, which is slow and tedious. That's why I prefer automated testing. I'm just too lazy to manually test every aspect of the applications I'm building, after each tiny change

.NET-Core

APM for .Net Core on Linux - Beyond Log Analyzing

For the folks out there, not familiar with the abbreviation APM, in the context of this post stands for Application Performance Monitoring. APM 0.1 - Leverage existing tools (and logs) For the last 2 years, I'm part of a team building an exciting new B2B application using the latest

Postgres

Repeatable Read vs Serializable Isolation Level in Postgres

The question I want to answer here, is the question I had for the last 1.5 years: When to use which isolation level and what is the difference in real world scenarios? What's wrong with read committed? First off, you might wonder, why am I comparing those 2 strict

WPF

Combine Multiple ViewModels in WPF

I just helped a colleague of mine with a tricky task: * The user chooses from a drop down on View 1 * Based on that choice, data and controls in View 3 need to be adjusted The task description is straight forward and basically resembles any slightly more complicated wizard. Unfortunately,

Docker

Hosting Static Files in Containers

Currently I'm hosting a bunch of static HTML files (with CSS, JS, images, ...) inside a plane nginx container. Mostly nginx:alpine, but sometimes also openresty/openresty:alpine and other similar containers, to be precise. The odd thing is, this container is either behind an nginx reverse proxy, which could server

Docker

Upgrade Postgres Container to Version 10

For a newer version to this post, have a look at Upgrading Postgres Docker containers Postgres version 10 is here - well actually it's out for couple months already, but I finally got to use it. In fact I got to upgrade an existing Postgres 9.6 container to version

Do You Have a README in Your Repository?

This post is not about RTFM[1]. It is also not about commenting every public and private function in your code, just to increase the amount of comments. Since I read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin I try to write as few comments a possible and dispize those useless

Angular

The State of Angular and TypeScript Development in 2018

For everyone who just wants to see the summary of how I'm doing Angular and TypeScript development today, TL;DR would be enough. If you want the whole story - why I chose those tools, skip it and move forward to the full post. TL;DR * You can use any

Tools

Jekyll vs postach.io vs ghost

As I wrote in my last post (and my first for a long time), I realized that I didn't write for almost 2 years. Reflecting on how it happened, I of course found a lot of excuses, since a lot was going on in that time, and I just couldn't

Tools

What changed since 2012? - Things are simpler now! (in 2018)

Yesterday, I realized, that it's been almost 2 long years since my last post. A lot has happened in that time and while migrating this blog to ghost, I reflected on some older posts of mine and noticed how things got easier. Since most of my posts are basically about

Tools

Vagrant on Windows with gulp-watch and similar file watching tools

As you might have guessed from my previous posts I love Vagrant and Gulp. I think those tools are awesome. They make my life much easier by either packing everything into a VM which I can destroy and recreate whenever things go south (Vagrant), or automating every little bit I

Tools

Vagrant + Docker = Rainbows + Unicorns

Be honest with yourself, how many applications and services do you have running on your machine right now? And how many do you really need? Step 0 - rant 2 weeks ago, when I started my new job, I remembered the times when I just had to fill up my

Other

3 Types of Programmers and Why Programming Should Be Easy

Few days ago I listened to Scott Hanselman's 500th podcast (congratulations on that), You don't know JS with Getify (Kyle Simpson). Not everyone needs to know, how to drive a stick I had mixed feelings about that podcast and was thinking for a long time about Scott's analogy of driving

TypeScript

Getting Started With TypeScript and AngularJS

Almost a year ago, I wrote an introductory article about developing server and client applications in TypeScript - TypeScript Development in Practice. A lot of things have changed since then so this is a longer and much more thorough description of what is possible today: It's said, the first step

TypeScript

How to write your own TypeScript Definition Files

TypeScript is an amazing language. It makes working with JavaScript just so much easier, at least for me. To be honest, I never really understood or even liked JavaScript. It was a mystery for me, how you can use it to write large applications. But when TypeScript came out -

TypeScript

Explaining How `this` Changes in JavaScript and TypeScript

My girlfriend is learning Meteor as she already has some knowledge in AngularJS and I personally think TypeScript would make her life easier (eventually) I suggested her, to follow the great tutorial on AngularJS with Meteor, but implement it in TypeScript. Her code is on GitHub, in case you want

C#

Handling Excel-Files (*.xls, *.xlsx) in Web Applications ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.ZipException: EOF in header

I'm working on a SaaS application in ASP.NET MVC, which takes your KPIs and presents them to you in clear overviews and graphs, so you can see at a glance, how your business is doing and what needs to change. This is for SMEs, which to a large extent

ASP.NET-MVC

Request Authorization in ASP.NET Web API in Mono

Few days ago I was struggling to set up authorization on requests to my Web API. The major Problem was missing sessions. You can read more here: Request Authorization in ASP.NET Web API. After I set it up, it was running and everything seemed great until I found out

ASP.NET-MVC

Request Authorization in ASP.NET Web API

When you use ASP.NET Web API as a back-end for your JavaScript heavy Single Page Application (SPA), you might want to check who is performing requests, before you answer with a result. In my case, the different permissions are a bit bulky and I'm storing them in the user's

TypeScript

TypeScript Development in Practice

I'm using TypeScript already since 2012 for rich client development on top of AngularJS. As the server was written in ASP.Net, we were using Visual Studio for Server and Client. I didn't have almost any experience in JavaScript, or Angular. So TypeScript's strong typing and the type definitions (.d.

Tools

Ignore node_modules in Dropbox

Actually this problem isn't only about NodeJS development and the node_modules folders, but this is where it's the most pain. It's more about having any kind of way to download and generate a ton of files within seconds and afterwards waiting for hours, or even days for Dropbox to

Java

SQLiteException: no such table - in Android

I was just struggling for a while trying to help with an Android app. I have almost no specific Android experience, but as the app is pretty basic, I thought - can't be that hard. The beginning seemed pretty easy and straight forward, until we stumbled upon this exception: android.

ASP.NET-MVC

What to Consider when running ASP.NET MVC 4 in Mono

I'm fighting for the last 2 days to deploy my ASP.NET MVC 4 application to a Linux VM running Mono again. - Again because it already worked, but in the meanwhile Microsoft updated the MVC 4 library and something broke (read more: Microsoft Asp.Net MVC Security Update MS14-059