Custom version numbers in Azure DevOps yaml pipelines
I’m a fan of semantic versioning, especially for software meant to be consumed by other developers, such as NuGet packages. If you want to use semantic versi...
Recent Posts
Awesome Azure DevOps resources
I’m a huge fan of Microsoft’s Azure DevOps. As a developer, it’s a single place that allows me to do everything. It stores my code, tracks my project ideas a...
Ignite 2019 mass session download script
The Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference has ended, and you know what that means. Time to mass download all the sessions you missed!
Great Xamarin.Forms workshop from Ignite 2019
I’m lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference this year, and do a pre-conference workshop. The workshop I chose to do was Build your first ...
You don’t scale, so don’t be a hero
I’ve been writing code since 1999; professionally since 2009. For many years I put in 60+ hours a week at my job. I was young. I was committed. And most impo...
Examples of setting up Serilog in .Net Core 3 Console apps and ASP .Net Core 3
It had been a while since I created a new console app from scratch, and all of my previous ones had been .Net Framework console apps, so when I needed to mak...
Create and test PowerShell Core cmdlets in C#
Creating PowerShell Core cmdlets in C# is actually quite easy, especially when you have a great blog post like this one to reference. There is also some offi...
Catch and display unhandled exceptions in your WPF app
When creating a WPF application, one of the best things you can do upfront is add some code to catch any unhandled exceptions. There are numerous ways unhand...
A better way to do TestCases when unit testing with Pester
Note: Pester v5 was released which made breaking changes. The code shown here works with Pester v4 and previous, but not v5. I’m hoping to update this pos...
Order Outlook Deleted Items folder by date deleted
If you’ve ever deleted an email by accident and had to hunt it down in your Outlook Deleted Items folder to recover it, this tip is for you! You can have Out...
Migrating my blog from WordPress to Jekyll and GitHub Pages
You may have noticed my blog has a very different look now! It used to look like this.
PowerShell Log Levels Included In TFS 2017 and VSTS Build and Release Logs
We use quite a few custom PowerShell scripts in some of our builds and releases. This led me to ask the question, which PowerShell log levels actually get wr...
Strongly sign your Visual Studio extension’s 3rd party assemblies to avoid assembly-loading errors at runtime
When trying to create a Visual Studio 2017 version of my Diff All Files Visual Studio extension, I was encountering a runtime error indicating that a module ...
Continuously Deploy Your ClickOnce Application From Your Build Server
ClickOnce applications are a great and easy way to distribute your applications to many users, and have the advantage of offering automatic application updat...
Creating A .PFX Certificate And Applying It On The Build Server At Build Time
There are many project types that require a .pfx file in order to build and/or publish successfully, such as ClickOnce and UWP (Universal Windows Platform) a...
Limit The Number Of C# Tasks That Run In Parallel
Why I needed to throttle the number of Tasks running simultaneously
Fix MSBuild 2015 Compile Taking A Very Long Time
I created the Invoke-MsBuild PowerShell Module (also available in the PowerShell Gallery), and recently added support to use the Visual Studio 2015 version o...
Module to Synchronously Zip and Unzip using PowerShell 2.0
If you search for ways to zip and unzip files using PowerShell, you will find that there a lot of different methods. Some people invoke .Net 4.5 assembly met...
Tell Microsoft To Fix The Sql Server Management Studio “Connect to Server” Dialog Position
If you use Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS) with multiple monitors, you likely run into the issue where the “Connect to Server” dialog window opens up eit...