Blog

My employer Betabit hosted a Hack Yourself First workshop by Troy Hunt on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th of June. Because we are always looking to improve, this was a great opportunity to tune up our security skills. We had a great time, got terrified and most of all: we learned a lot. First contact: a Twitter DM to Troy Hunt You think you know security We’ve seen a lot of different subjects during the workshop.

Earlier this year two colleagues and I attended Microsoft Build for the first time. In short: it was amazing. For those looking for more info: here’s a short recap on what we saw and did while we were there. Keynotes Yes, I’ve watched Build keynotes of earlier editions online. And yes, it felt big and impressive when I did so. Imagine how much more big and impressive it is to actually be there!

Part of the system we are developing uses AngularJS. Because we had an increase in the use of our system, and more diverse configurations were using our system, we got some new bugs filed. One of these bugs was about a select list showing the binding in stead of the actual value for several options. Since this ‘worked on our machines’ it had to be connected to the client’s configuration. As soon as stuff (options in this case) started moving around, it got even prettier…

We held a 2.5 hour presentation about .NET Core at the Betabit office in Rotterdam on March 29th. Where ‘we’ means my colleague Oscar van Tol and myself. We ended up having way too much content for the evening. We decided to host a hands-on workshop for those interested. At that workshop we will not only show .NET Core, but also enable you to have a go at it yourself. The location will most probably be the Betabit office in Utrecht because it’s located more central.

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

After updating Visual Studio 2015 (there was an update for GitHub Extensions, one for the NuGet Package Manager and, of course, there was Visual Studio 2015 Update 2) I tried to add the WindowsAzure.Storage NuGet package to a project I started about a month ago. I opened NuGet Package Manager, went to the Browse tab and typed WindowsAzure.Storage. The result: No Packages Found. OK, so then I’ll just…. Wait… WHAT?

Just ran into an exception when running both update-database and add-migration in the Package Manager Console for an EF Code First project. The Exception read: The type initializer for System.Data.Entity.Migrations.DbMigrationsConfiguration\'1 threw an exception. The cause? An invalid config file for the project I was trying to run the tools for. So: if you run into this exception, check your configs 😉

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

‼ There’s new information in this issue. Please read the updates at the bottom of the article.‼ We use our own TFS server and were using TFS 2013 Update 2 up until last Tuesday. We have several build definitions for my current project, and most of them are scheduled at a specific time, because we have specific times for automatic deployment. Up until Tuesday, everything seemed to work well and the Builds ran at the specified time (both before and after Daylight Saving Time applied).

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.