Open Telemetry - Deep Dive into Open Telemetry for .NET Open Telemetry - Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core Open Telemetry - Exporting Open Telemetry Data to Jaeger Open Telemetry - Optimally Configuring Open Telemetry Tracing for ASP.NET Core Configuring tracing in Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core can be a fairly simple process but never accept the defaults! There is always more we can do to make improvements. In this post, I'll show you how you can take the simplest setup for Open Telemetry tracing I showed you in 'Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core' and move to a more ful ..read more

Yesterday I livestreamed myself upgrading a project to .NET 6 and C# 10. Along the way I tried using a new C# 10 feature called implicit using statements and discovered that it wasn't quite as straightforward as I first thought and you should probably not use it under certain circumstances. Here is the live stream for those who are interested (I'm eager to get any feedback on how I'm presenting as its not a natural skill for me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjnS4oF8K3E What are Implicit Using Statements? Adding the line below to your .csproj project file turns the feature on: <Implicit ..read more

Winget is a package manager for Windows a bit like apt for linux or the open source Chocolatey for Windows. Version 1.1 of the Windows Package Manager (winget) was recently released. I've had my eye on it for a while now and its only recently gotten good enough to use for real. It now has the ability to install Windows Store applications and its library of apps that you can search for and install has gotten quite big. My PowerShell script to get a new machine started quickly with all the essential applications that I use as a .NET/Web developer is shown below. # Environment Variables [System ..read more

A few weeks ago Scott Hanselman blogged about creating dotnet new based projects directly from Visual Studio. Unfortunately, at that time Visual Studio 16.9 didn't properly support full solution templates and only supported project templates. Happily, Microsoft just released Visual Studio 16.10 and one of the things they didn't talk about was that it now adds a user interface for creating solutions from dotnet new templates. Given that I author the .NET Boxed solution and item templates, I thought I'd run through how it's done. Step by Step The first step is to install a dotnet new based solut ..read more

I was recently asked an interesting question about unit test code coverage and frontend testing by a colleague: Policies describe 80% plus unit test coverage and our React devs are pushing back a lot, arguing there is little logic in React and it would be a wast of time. Rehan any advice/pointer for us on this? Code coverage in tests is always a controversial topic with developers in which I don't think there is a 'correct' answer. The answer you're going to get from most people is 'it depends' ??. If you're developing a mars rover where one bad line of code could mean mission over or flight ..read more

Recently I've been writing web components and found several gotchas that make working with them, that much more difficult. In this post, I'll describe some gotchas you can experience when using web components. This post is framework agnostic but I've been using a lightweight library called FAST Element built by Microsoft. It is similar to Google's LitElement in that it provides a very lightweight wrapper around native web component API's. Overall the experience has been interesting but I'm not sure I'm willing to give up on Vue just yet. This post was written based on my experiences with it. N ..read more

Learning CSS is difficult and as someone who has tried to teach CSS others, it's also difficult to point to good teaching resources. There isn't a simple video course I can point to and say "go and watch this". I think part of the problem is that there are so many ways to do things in CSS and also that there are so many little tricks you have to learn. As yet, the best advice I've been able to give is to go and read the last few years worth of CSS Tricks blog posts but that isn't really an easy or quick task or even one that most people would do. In this post, I wanted to give some super simpl ..read more

There are no hard and fast rules for code style and as I've written about before it can get ugly when people have various opposing opinions on the subject. In CSS, which I'm quite fond of writing, I believe the answer is mostly given to us by using Prettier, the opinionated code formatter. Unfortunately, Prettier does not sort CSS properties for you and never will, so this post is one solution (not the correct solution because there is no correct solution). There are automated tools like postcss-sorting that can help with this but I think it'd be difficult to use in real life because there wil ..read more

Open Telemetry - Deep Dive into Open Telemetry for .NET Open Telemetry - Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core Open Telemetry - Exporting Open Telemetry Data to Jaeger Open Telemetry - Optimally Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core As I talked about in my first post, the end goal is to get nice visualisations from our Open Telemetry data, so we can spot patterns and learn something from the behaviours of our applications. In this post, I'll show how we can export the Open Telemetry traces, logs and metrics that we've collected to Jaeger and view them in the Jaeger dashboard. Ope ..read more

Open Telemetry - Deep Dive into Open Telemetry for .NET Open Telemetry - Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core Open Telemetry - Optimally Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core Configuring Open Telemetry for ASP.NET Core is a fairly simple process. In this post, I'll show you the simplest setup for tracing Open Telemetry in ASP.NET Core and then move to a more fully featured example. To begin with, we'll just be exporting our Open Telemetry traces to the debug output so we can see what is being recorded but we'll soon move on to exporting to Jaeger in another post where we can see ..read more