We are building our branch portal software discoverize on top of the mature Orchard CMS and incorporate important changes from the Orchard sources into our own software. Today, I wanted to add the CacheManagerExtensions class to discoverize to take advantage of some optimizations to the cache population strategy. The first commit contained changes to no less than 27 files. Manual work: go away! So I thought to myself: I'll just get the patch for this commit and apply it to my working directory :-) Well, guess what? There's no magic patch button on the commit page anywhere. Google and this blog post to the rescue… Download a Commit as a Patch It turns out to be as easy as adding .patch to the end of the commit url – and you get a beatiful text screen that you can save to a .patch file. Applying as much of a patch as possible Use git apply --reject abc.patch to apply all of the patch that can be applied to your current working directory – for the rest of the differences in the commit, reject files (.rej) will be created to not loose track of them. And that's all. Happy patching!

This is a digitalized version of my session notes from the conference. Key Questions How fast is it? How fast could it be? How fast should it be? Always measure your gains – which implies you need to measure your current performance. Allocations Cost – Sometimes A Lot Here's an example from Hyperion (fork of Wire): original code – allocates a new byte array on every call optimized code – reuses a byte array from a pool What are the gains of this small change? Optimizations like this one pay off especially in low-level code or inside of libraries that will be consumed by third parties. As always – first measure, then optimize. Tools for the performance minded BenchmarkDotNet: a .NET benchmarking framework marten: async document database and/or event store Hyperion: a high performance polymorphic serializer for the .NET framework, built for Akka.NET Jil: Fast .NET JSON (De)Serializer, Built On Sigil protobuf-net: Protocol Buffers library for idiomatic .NET Microsoft Bond: cross-platform framework for cross-language de/serialization with powerful generic mechanisms (this is not your go-to tool when you just want to de/serialize some data quickly ;-) - it's a whole framework) Have fun and stay focused!

"Microservices" was the buzzword during the conference with over half of the talks mentioning them and a few diving quite deep into the topic, e.g. Michele Leroux Bustamante with her session "Surviving Microservices". Here's a pretty diagram of what to imagine when hearing "microservices": [Diagram credits go to Chris Richardson from microservices.io] Why Microservices? Well, there are some neat things to learn from a microservices architecture: a microservice forms the smallest architectural quantum (term coined by Neal Ford et al.) i.e. a part of a system's architecture that can be managed separately from the rest of the system microservices can be developed and deployed by independent teams on individual schedules, thus minimizing coupling and risk of failure microservices can be easily scaled out Docker plays an important role in the deployment story During Development use a separate source repository per service create NuGet packages for them, that can be versioned, and let consumers of your service decide when they are ready to upgrade set up infrastructure early: Docker, DevOps, CI, CD Troubleshooting Well, with a distributed architecture such as one consisting of microservices, troubleshooting can become a real challenge. That's why it's important to implement something along the lines of an activity id that will be attached to every action processed in any of the microservices. This id can later be used to follow the flow of a business process through the application. Wise quote at the end Once you've accepted your flaws, nobody can use them against you. Thank you. Happy microservicing!

A colleague of mine and I attended the .NET Developer Days conference this year. It was my third time participating; he was there for the first time. Here are links to the complete agenda and the pre-con workshops. My personal conference schedule Wednesday, October 18th Programming ASP.NET MVC Core (abstract) Dino Esposito @github Thursday, October 19th Surviving Microservices (abstract) Michele Leroux Bustamante – Opening Keynote Build Web Apps the “Progressive” Way (300) (abstract) Jeff Burtoft @github Async/Await and the Task Parallel Library: await headexplosion (400) (abstract) Daniel Marbach @github Setting up a CI/CD pipeline for a Containerized Project in VSTS (200) (abstract) Maciej Misztal – Sponsor Session Adding History to CRUD (400) (abstract) Dino Esposito Software Architecture That Every Developer Should Know (300) (abstract) Alon Fliess Building for the Future without Abandoning the Past (200) (abstract) Jeff Burtoft Friday, October 20th Performance that pays off (300) (abstract) Szymon Kulec @github The Performance Investigator’s Field Guide (300) (abstract) Sasha Goldshtein Building Evolutionary Architectures (300) (abstract) Neal Ford Securing .NET applications in Azure (300) (abstract) Sebastian Solnica – Sponsor Session How I Built An Open-Source Debugger (300) (abstract) Sasha Goldshtein Stories Every Developer Should Know (abstract) Neal Ford – Closing Keynote Random notes about the conference Predominant Topic Microservices are everywhere – this is my take on it Best Session The Performance Investigator's Field Guide – here I've shared my impressions Catering Inter Bankiet delivered fantastic food and drinks, including lots of good coffee and sandwiches Event Venue EXPO XXI, Warsaw – a good place for the conference, a few walking minutes from Warszawa Zachodnia Summary The 2017 edition of the .NET Developer Days was a success. I still have to process my notes and all the input I've gathered there. I will update my personal conference schedule with links to my own digest posts of the sessions where it makes sense. If you want to attend the 2018 edition, you will be able to catch a super early bird ticket from the beginning of December! Happy conferencing!

It's been an impressive year so far in the realms of software development and deployment, especially with ASP.NET vNEXT enabling per-application bundling of not only the .NET runtime but even the CLR needed for your app Docker standardizing the software delivery process by use of Linux containers (runs on Windows in a VM), (here's A Docker ‘Hello World' With Mono) and now Microsoft announcing native Docker Support for Windows Server Now, it took me a while to understand that we're witnesses of nothing less than a revolution in software development. The Vision: Build Your App Anywhere, Bundle It, and Run It Anywhere (Else) The clouds have been with us for a couple of years now and have started to provide real benefit beyond "moving your stuff to somewhere else". What's emerging now, with Docker and also the new ASP.NET runtime bundling, is something completely new: Application Containers. They don't have either specific OS requirements – Docker will be supported natively on Windows Server soon, ASP.NET runs on Linux today – nor need they a specific technology stack installed on the target machine (as with PaaS) because they bring all of the necessary runtime along. But they're also not large VMs bundled with your application, which carry a significant maintenance overhead (when using IaaS). Virtualized application containers are the sweet spot between IaaS and PaaS. Go ahead and read that post – it's eye-opening.

This post is one of several summarizing some of the sessions I attended during the .NET Developer Days conference in October 2014. Check out the rest of them. Here are my notes from a whole day of sessions diving deep into Visual Studio and its possibilities, lead by Kate Gregory: Window positioning When drag'n'dropping windows you can drop them in any place you like, even in a place where VS suggests to dock it to another window group, by holding down the CTRL key and then releasing the mouse button. Using the Start Page Probably 3% of all developers use it but it's gotten better over the years. You can now pin projects to it so they won't fall of the most recently used list, you can remove unneeded projects by right clicking or open its folder if you forgot where you keep it. Also, the start age hides itself once you open a project or a file so you don't have to close it by hand anymore. Navigating Code If you want to go to the definition of a symbol just get your cursor on it and press F12 which is the shortcut for Go To Definition. That will open the file that contains the definition of given symbol. Now, if you want to drill down into a deeper hierarchy and don't care for the intermediate definitions, give Alt+F12 a try – it's the shortcut for Peek Definition and it will open the definition of the given symbol in an iframe type of window right inside the code you're looking at. You can then use that window to follow further definitions without leaving the current point of interest. [Can't find that menu item in the Express edition, though.] Also, give bookmarks a try! There's a bookmark manager where you can give your bookmarks a name, group them into folders and the like. Quite helpful to quickly find your way around a large codebase or for presentations. Finding things There's great inline find window by now in VS that you can control from your keyboard in no time. Use Ctrl+F to open it with the word prefilled that your cursor is currently on or use Ctrl+F3 to search for the next occurrence of the word your cursor is on. This little tool is really worth getting to know well because it can save you a lot of time when looking for stuff or replacing it. Have you noticed the search text box at the top of the Solution Explorer? There's even a shortcut to get there so you don't have to take your hand off the keyboard. Be prepared to find even more search boxes here and there, e.g. the Error List has one, too! Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Visual Studio Online is a new one-stop solution for hosting projects and collaborating on them in the cloud. It basically offers cloud-based TFS instances. The basic plan is free for up to 5 users in a project with an unlimited number of stakeholders, who are allowed view burndown charts, backlogs, Kanban, and task boards, and may even create new Work Items. It supports, of course, TFVC but also Git for source control. In Visual Studio, use the Team Explorer window to work with your remote TFS, e.g. your Visual Studio Online account, but you can choose to manage your project through a web browser just as well. There's powerful work item editor available online, have a look and take a minute to grasp what all it offers: I'd call it impressive. There's really a ton of features here, and no doubt there are other tools out there to do the same thing. What really cuts it for me: Visual Studio Online is free for up to 5 users and an unlimited number of stakeholders. The integration with Visual Studio is seamless. [You can do pretty much all of the management work either in VS or online.] Sign out of VisualStudio.com If you're logged into VisualStudio.com you can log out by opening the drop-down menu next to your login name, choosing "Account settings…" and there clicking "Sign out". Beware that you have to be logged in with a Microsoft account if you want to use the Express version for longer than 30 days. Debugging I'll just put stuff into a list here for better readability: Have you  met the Autos window? Seems not to be included in the Express version but when hitting a breakpoint it offers insight into all variables used on the current line, the previous line and after exiting a function, shows its return value even if you didn't assign to any variable! The Locals window captures the values of all variables defined in the current scope without the need to add them to the Watch window. Press the CTRL key to temporarily hide the variable inspector popup window: -> Pin values from the above window so you'll keep their values in view – even during the next debugging session! Set your cursor on a line of code and choose Run To Cursor from the context menu to continue running your code up until the line with the cursor. Wow! Or choose Set Next Statement to skip all code from the current breakpoint onwards and jump to the selected line. Wow²! Edit + Continue is also great but works only in 32-bit mode :-| IntelliTrace (in the Ultimate edition) allows you to capture execution traces of your software on a client machine and debug (through replaying) the same set of instructions inside your local VS – Kate Gregory called it Time Travel Debugging ;-) That's it from the first day. Happy developing!

I'm currently attending the first .NET Developer Days conference in Wrocław, Poland, and will put up a few posts with my notes from some of the sessions I was able to attend. The conference took place from 14.10. to 16.10.2014 in the Wrocław Stadium. Here's a list of all posts (I'll update the links as soon as I finish a given post): Visual Studio 2013 Hidden Gems ASP.NET vNEXT SQL Server Data Tools: An Intro Continuous Deployment WebAPI, OData There's already been a lot of input and the third day is still ahead of me! I hope I'll be able to update the above list soon. Happy Coding!

Today, I found this dusty piece of code in our code base: Stone-age version public string GetIframeIds() {     var result = new StringBuilder();     var first = true;     foreach (var iframe in _iframes)     {         if (!first) result.Append(',');         else first = false;         result.Append("'" + iframe.ClientID + "'");     }     return result.ToString(); } … and just had to rewrite it to this: Updated version public string GetIframeIds() {     return string.Join(",", _iframes.Select(ifr => "'" + ifr.ClientID + "'")); } I couldn't bear but run some micro-performance test on these code snippets since StringBuilder is usually quite fast. I ran each of the snippets with an _iframes length of 30 in a loop of 10.000 iterations and yes, the first version is faster with 215ms vs. 360ms. But then, in production I run that code block only once per request, not 10.000 times as in the test. Spending 21ns or 36ns in that method won't make any significant difference, especially when looking at request execution times of beyond 100ms. Why should you or I care? The second code block is arguably easier to read, quicker to write, and harder to get wrong. Happy coding!

Today, I finally decided that I want to get to grips with PowerShell and have it available in my toolbox for those everyday developer tasks. For a fresh start, I wanted to make sure I'm running the latest and greatest of PowerShell, but how do I find out which version I have installed? What version am I running? Just fire up a PowerShell instance and type $psversiontable or $host.version: PS C:\Windows\system32> $psversiontable Name                           Value ----                           ----- PSVersion                      4.0 WSManStackVersion              3.0 SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1 CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.18444 BuildVersion                   6.3.9600.16406 PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0} PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.2 PS C:\Windows\system32> $host.version Major  Minor  Build  Revision -----  -----  -----  -------- 4      0      -1     -1 Actually, when I ran this I didn't have the 4.0 version installed yet. So where did I get it? How to install Powershell 4.0 (the newest version as of mid 2014)? Go here and choose the right link for you: How to Install Windows PowerShell 4.0. That's it. Make use of great tooling: use the ISE Last but not least, especially for those of you who like me are just getting started, make sure you're using the great Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) that comes bundled with PowerShell: Now, get scripting!

Not much else to say than what's mentioned in the title. I come across the need to do so mostly before deployments from my machine where I want to update my local master branch to the HEAD of the remote master branch. Here's how to do that: 1: git fetch origin master:master Thank you stackoverflow and Cupcake!