.NET

Occasionally it is necessary to access services running on the host machine from a container. You may be inclined to use localhost to reach the host, but this will not work as the container itself is localhost. Here is how to access host services from a container running on Windows Server 2016. This applies to containers running with NAT networking mode. This is the default, so unless you explicitly use something else, this should work for you. ...

The goal of this article is to describe a fast way to get started with creating an end-to-end continuous deployment setup with Visual Studio Team Services and Azure. With few resources and in little time you should be able to get a full setup going that deploys a web application to Azure without any downtime for users. The article is split into three parts. This first part will provide a brief overview of the practices applied and services used in the setup. The remaining two parts will go into the details of setting it up. The parts are outlined as follows: ...

In this post I have gathered ten useful features of Visual Studio Team Services. Many of these are not new features, but you had to dig a little to find out they were there. In the recent months the UI has received several improvements and some of these are now more visible, without having to dive deep in the collection administration. There are also a couple of recent additions that should make your life easier! ...

npm install -g for .NET? it’s here! There is a (somewhat) hidden gem in the new .NET world with DNVM, DNX and DNU - creating and distributing global tools with ease. Global meaning the application is always available through one or more commands in the command prompt (basically being registered in the PATH system variable). In the Node.js community this has been a central part, allowing you to install useful tools using the Node Package Manager. “Secret Manager”, part of ASP.NET 5, is an example of such a tool in the .NET world - but it is also one of the only examples currently available. Here is how simple it is to get started with it: ...

Running unit tests as part of the build process with Visual Studio Online requires no effort if you use Visual Studio Unit Testing Framework. But really, not a lot use that these days. I have done a few presentations on using the build services in Visual Studio Online for Continuous Integration. Unfortunately it seems common that it is a bit troublesome to run either xUnit or NUnit tests as part of the build process. Here are the few steps that enables either xUnit or NUnit with VSO Build (the new version!). ...

I have seen different approaches to using the device camera with Xamarin Forms. Here’s an example of how this might be implemented, with an async interface for easy async-await consumption in the shared Xamarin Forms part of the application. I will show the implementation details of the shared code and iOS version. The full example is available on https://github.com/jlandersen/xamarin-forms-camera that includes Windows Phone and Android parts as well. If you are unfamiliar with accessing native features of the different platforms, check out the official documentation. ...

ASP.NET 5 is on it’s way which will level the playing field a bit in comparison with other web stacks, primarily enabled through the integration of Node.js with Visual Studio. Exciting times indeed! In the project templates provided with the currently available Visual Studio 2015 CTP, the “non-empty” projects are configured with Grunt and Bower. In this post I will walk through setting up an empty solution with Bower and Gulp, an alternative to Grunt. The goal is to demonstrate how all the new possibilities are actually wired up in an ASP.NET 5 solution and show how you might replace Grunt with Gulp as task runner instead. ...

Developing a product that is multi-tenant is a pretty interesting challenge. Recently I was in the fortunate situation of having to work on such a thing. By giving organisations access to a tenant through a subdomain of choice is a pretty neat approach that provides users a sense of personal ownership of the product. In this post I will show a simple approach of how to use subdomains to identify the corresponding tenant in ASP.NET MVC 5. ...

In this post I will show how to customize the title and header section of the Tabbed Page control, when running on Windows Phone. On WP this is the pivot control being used, which is quite different from the tabs used on both iOS and Android. Let’s say you wish to just change the font or completely restyle the title or the header showing the sections. You can create the complete page as a native Windows Phone XAML page with a pivot control and let that render. This gives complete control of the page and the pivot control, but makes the sacrifice of reducing how much code is shared. ...

All CRM plugins must be signed with a strong key in order to be deployed (both for letting Dynamics CRM be able to handle assembly naming conflicts and if you deploy it to the GAC on the server). I have come across a couple of projects where the password for the strong name key file was stuck in the head of another person – and later forgotten – making it troublesome set up a new development machine to build and deploy a solution. ...