Tag: General

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 allocate and free memory explicitly. But sometimes, it still matters to understand when and where memory is allocated. The reason for that is simple: if we can use efficient coding to help our GC spend less CPU time allocating and freeing memory we can make our applications faster and less “allocatey”.

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, and am really happy that I got the freedom and support for changing that. The quest towards server stability even got me a well-received conference talk, “Sherlock Homepage”. Thanks Jeff (x2), Yishai, Hari, Jun and team! Mission accomplished! And thanks for the great walks in wonderful Washington state when I was over there, I’ll sure miss stopping by that region every once in a while.

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 people to visit and hopefully sign up to our service. We decided on starting a series on the MyGet blog, named “NuGet and NPM news from the community”.

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 packaging .NET Core libraries. Let’s see how. TL;DR: Want to use Bitbucket pipelines to build .NET Core libraries? Grab this bitbucket-pipelines.yml and add it to source control.

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!

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, some got less and one even only got hit by our monitoring system and no other traffic. That sucks!

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 can install them during deployment. Let’s see how.

Pretty sweet: MyGet just announced Vsix support has been enabled for all MyGet customers! I wanted to work on a fun example for this new feature and came up with this: how can we use MyGet to build and distribute a Roslyn analyzer and code fix? Let’s see.

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tenant and the application will use that to select the correct database connection, render the correct stylesheet and so on. Great! But how to do this with ASP.NET MVC 6?

I’m back on Windows Phone. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have read in the past weeks that I switched from being a Windows Phone user to being an Android user. Having been on the platform since before Windows Phone 7 was RTM, I found the operating system was getting slower and slower and less stable on my Nokia Lumia 620. So when I saw a shiny Android being fast, stable and having all the apps I needed, I was sold. Until today, when I switched back to a Windows Phone device. And maybe I’ll switch back again.