A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it decides to keep objects around in memory or reclaim them. There’s one specific type we never touched on in that post: strings. Why would we? They look like val... Read more »
The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited memory, by reclaiming memory that is no longer in use and making it available to our code again. By doing so, it also takes away the burden of having to alloca... Read more »
At the start of 2015, I checked out from JetBrains to join Microsoft. Today, after almost two years in the NuGet team, it’s time for change. Microsoft and NuGet have been a fun ride, and I got to complete my personal mission… I remember Paul Stack trolling me (“Hey Maarten, is NuGet down?”) on more than one occasion... Read more »
You may know (or not, shame on you!) Xavier Decoster and myself are operating MyGet, a hosted service providing teams with hosting and management of NuGet, npm, Bower, VSIX and debugger symbols. Recently, we started looking into how we could do better on the content marketing front, an important piece of getting peo... Read more »
A while back, I signed up for the beta of Bitbucket Pipelines, a new continuous integration service from Atlassian, built into Bitbucket. The build system promises easy configuration using YAML files to describe the build steps. It runs builds in a Docker image, so that means we can also use it for building and pac... Read more »
Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive outrage about something that, in the end, usually does not seem so bad. This week’s topic: someone broke the Internet! Wait, break the Internet? Well, sort ... Read more »
In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load balancing we get on Azure Websites. When going through request logs, however, we discovered that of these several machines a few were getting a lot of traffic, som... Read more »
Using Azure Web Apps, we can deploy and host Node applications quite easily. But what to do with packages the site depends on? Do we have to upload them manually to Azure Web Apps? Include them in our Git repository? None of that: we just have to make sure our app’s package,json is checked in so that Azure Web Apps ... Read more »
I have been using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services since PDC 2008 when it was first announced. Ever since, I’ve been a huge fan of “cloud services”, the cattle VMs in the cloud that are stateless. In all those years, I have never seen this error, until yesterday: There is not enough space on the disk.at System.IO.__... Read more »
How would you validate a new API is compatible with an old API? While upgrading frameworks in a web application we’re building, that was exactly the question we were asking ourselves. Sure, we could write synthetic tests on each endpoint, but is that representative? Users typically find insane better ways to test an... Read more »