Akos Nagy - dotnet falcon (Page 7)

Adding your own help functionality to Visual Studio F1 Help

Jul 22, 2019

Not long ago a participant at a course of mine asked an interesting question. They were working on a project that used a .NET API extensively and they had developed their own set of internal documentation. The requirement was simple: you know the simple help feature of Visual Studio where

0 Comments

Visual Studio

Implementing the Repository pattern with direct IQueryable support

Akos Nagy

Jul 2, 2019

Lately I have written a lot of posts about the Repository and Unit of work patterns. You can check out all the software design posts about why I think they are (still) useful and how you can use the Specification pattern to improve on it. So this pattern has been

6 Comments

Autofac support for AutoMapper

Akos Nagy

Jun 27, 2019

I have been doing .NET development for quite a while now. Sometimes people ask me how is it possible that I still find it interesting. Well, the answer is easy: I'm super D.R.Y. If you are not familiar with the term, you should look it up,

11 Comments

Dependency injection

The specification pattern and variance

Akos Nagy

Jun 25, 2019

In a previous post I described the specification pattern, its uses and benefits and also gave a pretty neat implementation. However, there was something that I didn't discuss: the variance aspect of the pattern. It is a very important aspect, but that post was long enough as it

0 Comments

Software design

Supporting async LInQ evaluation on IQueryable mocks

Akos Nagy

Jun 18, 2019

IQueryable<T> is a tricky interface. Some people argue that it is actually a bad abstraction, because it is impossible to implement it. This post is not about trying to prove or disprove this point. People who say this do have a point, but I do think they

0 Comments

Trying the Azure SignalR service

Akos Nagy

Jun 14, 2019

Totally unexpectedly I ran into something "new" in Azure: the Azure SignalR service. It's been out there for a while, but somehow I haven't come across it (to be fair, it is now one of the better-marketed services of Azure). According to the documentation,

0 Comments

Azure

Default interface implementation in C# 8

Akos Nagy

Jun 12, 2019

A while back the preview version of the last big feature of C# 8 came out: default interface implementation. To be honest, I'm not really a fan of this new option and I have been pretty busy, so I didn't really have the time to check

0 Comments

C#

Duplex service over TCP with WCF

Akos Nagy

May 27, 2019

I was asked by one of my clients that I consult for to help with a TCP-based duplex communicaton solution using WCF. It's been a while since I have blogged about WCF (actually, it's been a while since I have used it), so I though it

0 Comments

WCF

Using the Specification pattern with Repository and Unit of work

Akos Nagy

May 22, 2019

The age-old question of whether you should use the Repository and Unit of work patterns comes up pretty often in my life. That's probably because I'm for and not against :) and whenever I teach or wherever I go to consult, I always tell people to use

5 Comments

Software design

Visual Studio extension to change the C# language version of a project

Akos Nagy

May 16, 2019

One of the courses that I teach is a workshop on the new features of the new C# language versions. During the course we look at the different language features of C# 6 and the newer versions. To illustrate the different features, I often change the language version of the

0 Comments

Entity Framework Code First generators templates

Akos Nagy

May 14, 2019

If you follow my blog, you know that one of the most prominently featured topics if Entity Framework. A not very-well known, but very useful feature of Entity Framework Code First is the ability to add your custom sql generators that are used when you create sql scripts from your

0 Comments

A Visual Studio extension to really clean your projects

Akos Nagy

May 10, 2019

A while back one of the participants at one of my C# courses asked me if there was a way to really clean your projects: that is, delete the bin and obj folders. Because I think we all know that the "clean project" option of Visual Studio does

0 Comments

Using dependency injection to configure Entity Framework DbContexts

Akos Nagy

May 6, 2019

So let's say you have your own DbContext descendant with a couple of DbSet<T> properties that contain your entities and you also want to configure some of your entities. If you know EF, you probably know how to do this (and why to do it

0 Comments

Entity Framework custom migration generator decorators

Akos Nagy

Apr 26, 2019

In the past I created a number of custom solutions to generate the migration sql from Entity Framework Code First migrations (see my post here for soft delete automation, here for auditing migration automatically, here for specifying filtered indices and the one I created recently about adding an index to

0 Comments

Design patterns medley: Command and decorator

Akos Nagy

Apr 23, 2019

I know that there are a lot of people out there who think design patterns are not useful or not important. You can learn them from any book or catalogue and then you simply add them to you code. While I try to be respectful of all opinions and definitely

0 Comments

Software design

Cosmos DB SDK v3 preview

Akos Nagy

Apr 17, 2019

A while back I reviewed the EF Core Cosmos DB provider preview. But that's not the only big change coming to Cosmos DB. The actual SDK that allows you access to all the features of the service is also getting an update. While I think it's

0 Comments

Entity Framework Core Cosmos DB provider

Akos Nagy

Apr 11, 2019

The Cosmos DB provider for Entity Framework has been available in preview for a while. I've been wanting to check it out ever since I read the announcement, but I haven't really had the time (and to be honest, I was worried it would be not

2 Comments

Updating my extensions for Visual Studio 2019

Akos Nagy

Apr 8, 2019

Last week, Visual Studio 2019 was finally released and with that, I think (I hope) most of us will switch to a new IDE with a lots of cool features. And with that in mind, I sat down and upgraded my extensions in the Visual Studio Marketplace to support the

0 Comments

Visual Studio

C# 8.0 in Visual Studio 2019: what's new

Akos Nagy

Apr 6, 2019

This week VS 2019 finally came out and I was going to write a very enthusiastic and very long post about the new language features of C# 8 that I was hoping would also premier with the new IDE. Well, I was wrong on all counts: no new language version,

0 Comments

C#

Countdown to C# 8: Making the Azure Storage API better with IAsyncEnumerable

Akos Nagy

Mar 28, 2019

C# 8 is just around the corner — and with that, this post will review the last, currently publicly available feature of the new language version: asynchronous streams. If you are interested in my take on the other two, currently available features, check out my posts on them here: * Non-nullable reference

0 Comments

C#
Azure

Generate index for TPH discriminator with Entity Framework Code First

Akos Nagy

Mar 26, 2019

When it comes to mapping inheritance hierarchies to database tables using an ORM, there are a lot of different options. Though it definitely has drawbacks, one of the most popular method is 'table-per-hierarhy' (TPH). TPH maps all the entities in the inheritance hierarchy to one table that contains

0 Comments

Entity Framework

Visual Studio extension to manage your Github gists

Akos Nagy

Mar 20, 2019

There are a couple of extensions available in the Visual Studio Marketplace to handle your Github gists — and not to belittle others, but I have to admit, I didn't like any of them. They are not intuitive or comfortable to use or lack features. What I wanted was

0 Comments

Visual Studio

Countdown to C# 8: Range and Index

Akos Nagy

Mar 18, 2019

In my previos post, I discussed one of the new features of C# 8: non-nullable reference types. That feature has been out for a while, so I think most of what can be said has already been said. But this time, I'm taking a look at something even

0 Comments

C#

Countdown to C# 8: Visual Studio 2019 first impressions and non-nullable reference types

Akos Nagy

Mar 11, 2019

The launch of Visual Studio 2019 is upon us — and with the new IDE, we also get a new compiler for the newest version of our favorite programming language. There are already a lot of reviews and previews about the features that are available in the preview, but I decided

0 Comments

An old trick for new dogs: collection initialization with an extension method in C# 6

Akos Nagy

Mar 6, 2019

During one of my courses, I was talking about the new language features of C# 3 to introduce the students LInQ. I was discussing collection initializers and extensions methods, when I made an off-hand remark about C# 6 allowing for the Add() method used for the collection initialization to be

0 Comments

C#
Teaching

Implementing the IFormatter interface

Akos Nagy

Feb 28, 2019

One of the courses I teach is the standard Microsoft 70-483 exam preparation course. For some reason, the exam still has questions about how the BinaryFormatter and SoapFormatter components work (I'm not even going to try to guess why), so the training material also discusses the related concepts

0 Comments

A Visual Studio extension to really clean your projects

Akos Nagy

Feb 25, 2019

During one of my C#-.NET courses, one of the participants was complaining how the "Clean solution" option of Visual Studio doesn't actually clean the solution. That is, it doesn't delete the bin and obj folders. And he was entirely right, and he

1 Comment

Decorating a component that doesn't want to be decorated

Akos Nagy

Feb 22, 2019

Decorator is one of the most useful OO design patterns out there. It's basically a holy grail of helping you stay S.O.L.I.D.: it lets you keep the responsibilities to a minimum in a component, while also being probably one of the best examples of

0 Comments

Software design

Converting traditional EF includes to EF Core includes

Akos Nagy

Feb 19, 2019

In a previous post I tried to give reasons why you should use the repository and unit of work design patterns even if you have a modern, object-relational framework like Entity Framework (well, modern would be up to debate in this case, but whatever). Besides the usual reasons ('EF

0 Comments

Entity Framework

Dependency injection for Visual Studio extensions

Akos Nagy

Feb 14, 2019

Dependency injection is awesome. I have written a lot of posts that start the same way; mostly because dependency injection is awesome. I'm not going into the details of why (I have already done that in those posts), let's just assume I'm right :) When

0 Comments

AZ-202 (AZ-203?) passed: Microsoft Azure Developer Certification Transition

Akos Nagy

Feb 9, 2019

A while back I posted about passing the 70-777 Cosmos DB beta exam. Last year I also received voucers to try the new role-based Azure certification exams. Since I have already passed the original 70-532 for developers, I decided to take on the new AZ-202 transition beta exam. Well I

0 Comments

Azure

Awesome Northwind

Akos Nagy

Feb 5, 2019

Whenever I give a talk at a meetup or teach at a course or just want to try a demo about a data driven technology, my biggest problem (and the biggest nag) is always to get some real(istic) sample data. Thankfully there are sample databases available on the internet

0 Comments

Updating the LinqPad CosmosDB datacontext driver - again

Akos Nagy

Feb 3, 2019

A while back I have received an issue in the Github repo of my LinqPad CosmosDB datacontext driver. After fixing that issue, the same individual also suggested a new feature. After fixing the bug, I have decided to take on this small enchancement. And now you can go ahead and

0 Comments

Updating the LinqPad CosmosDB datacontext driver

Akos Nagy

Jan 16, 2019

A while back I've created a data context driver for LinqPad so you can connect to your Azure CosmosDB databases as well. I'm very happy to see that it has caught on and a lot of you have at least downloaded it (and hopfully you are

0 Comments

Repository and unit of work ARE useful

Akos Nagy

Nov 20, 2018

The repository and unit of work design patterns are useful. This is a statement that I can get behind in any debate when this topic comes up. Don't worry, I'm not dogmatic, I have a couple of really good arguments (IMHO) as to why. But I&

0 Comments

Software design

Memento design pattern done (almost) right

Akos Nagy

Nov 13, 2018

I regularly teach courses on basic object-oriented design patterns. Over the years I have come to realize that not every pattern is equally useful or equally well-thought out. One of the most common examples of patterns that have become more like anti-patterns over the years is the Singleton pattern. But

0 Comments

Next level serverless apps with Azure Blobs

Akos Nagy

Nov 6, 2018

I've always been a huge advocate for (and fan of :) ) serverless apps. People often misjudge the concept: serverless doesn't mean that there is no server. I mean, what else would serve requests for the relatively primitive client side? There is a server. Maybe there is even

0 Comments

Azure

Stackoverflow adventures: Creating custom Ghost helpers using apps

Akos Nagy

Oct 31, 2018

If you follow my blog, you might have read my previous posts about creating Handlebars helpers and adding it to Ghost to extend the platform's functionality. Those features were quite heavy-weight and the only way I could make it work was to dig deep into Ghost and integrate

0 Comments

MS 70-777: Implementing Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Solutions Beta passed

Akos Nagy

Oct 27, 2018

A while back I received a voucher code that I could use to try the new – and then still beta – exam 70-777: Implementing Azure Cosmos DB Solutions. Since I do use Cosmos DB quite often (you can read my other Cosmos DB posts here, or check out the LinqPad Cosmos

0 Comments

Azure CosmosDb

Creating a most popular posts page with a custom ghost helper to download Google Analytics data

Akos Nagy

Oct 15, 2018

TL;DR I have created a custom Handlebars helper for Ghost to download the most viewed posts from Google Analytics. If you are only interested in using the helper, check out the Github repo and its wiki. The blog post below goes into a bit more detail on my motivation

5 Comments

Blogging

Creating an archive page with a custom Ghost helper to group a list of objects

Akos Nagy

Oct 11, 2018

TL;DR I have created a custom Handlebars helper for Ghost to group a list elements based on an arbitrary function. If you are only interested in using the helper, check out the Github repo and its wiki. The blog post below goes into a bit more detail on my

0 Comments

Blogging

Updating the blog - again

Akos Nagy

Oct 8, 2018

A while back I wrote a post about how I had upgraded the blog during the summer vacation with new features. Most of these were actual features, like the search function on the sidebar or the new tags page. I also told you to stay tuned, because more were coming

0 Comments

Blogging

Create custom helpers to add functionality to your Ghost blog

Akos Nagy

Oct 5, 2018

Some page * Resource1 * Resource2 * Resource3

1 Comment

Blogging

Dependency Injection Toolset upgrade

Akos Nagy

Oct 1, 2018

I have a little tool in the VS Marketplace called Dependency Injection Toolset. The idea behind the tool was to help developers who apply dependency injection regularly by making it easier to code constructor injection. The original version of the tool basically did two things: * Could generate a constructor for

0 Comments

New extension in the marketplace: Linq standard query operators practice project template

Akos Nagy

Sep 27, 2018

As a teacher, I'm constantly faced with a frustrating challenge: eliminating boilerplate code from demos. If students have to type a lot of boilerplate code before starting a demo together or an exercise, valuable time is lost and they don't get the same knowledge — and since

0 Comments

Upgrading the blog

Akos Nagy

Sep 24, 2018

It's been a while since I last posted on the blog. The summer was long and I spent more time in natural light :) But now I'm back with a renewed resolve. And I wasn't just lying around all summer — I did some upgrades to

0 Comments

Blogging

Deserialize into interface

Akos Nagy

Jun 12, 2018

Not long ago I was teaching a Programming in C# exam prep course. One of the modules involved serialization and a student asked me a question that was quite intriguing: Given the serialized form of an object, is it possible to deserialize it into an object if we only have

3 Comments

Visual Studio item template for WCF Data Services

Akos Nagy

Jun 6, 2018

If you are only interested in downloading the packages, go to the marketplace. But if you want to know how it was made, read on ;) Back in the day we used WCF when it came to distributed software. Of course, the times have a-changed since and now in the pink

0 Comments

Dependency injection toolset upgrade

Akos Nagy

May 21, 2018

Dependency injection is probably the best thing in software development since slide bread. I often blog about related things and I also have a Visual Studio extension to help those who apply the principles in practice. Guard clauses in constructors An important piece of best-practice is that whenever you use

0 Comments

What's new in C# 7.3?

Akos Nagy

May 14, 2018

C# 7.3 came out not long ago. I just had the time to do the update, so I thought I would do a post on it. There are a lot of other posts around about the same topic, but whatever. At least I can present this from my point

0 Comments

C#

LinqPad CosmosDb Data Context Driver Update - Part 3

Akos Nagy

May 12, 2018

In my last post and the one before that I was writing about the process of releasing a new version of my LinqPad CosmosDb DataContext Driver. Those were the two important steps to make before the actual update of the driver — and now, it's finally here. If you

0 Comments

LinqPad CosmosDb Data Context Driver Update - Part 2

Akos Nagy

May 9, 2018

In my latest post I described my first steps to update my LinqPad Cosmos Db driver The whole idea was to show how the "backend" of my new and updated driver can be used as a standalone component. This makes updating and maintaining the component much better and

0 Comments

LinqPad CosmosDb Data Context Driver Update - Part 1

Akos Nagy

May 7, 2018

A while back I created a CosmosDb data context driver for LinqPad. Originally, I found the request on uservoice and I thought I'd give it a try. The end result was pretty OK, I guess. People started using it; I mean, this is not the "next big

0 Comments

Adding logging using Mono.Cecil

Akos Nagy

May 5, 2018

A while back (actually, it's been a long while) I found an interesting question on Stackoverflow. The question was about adding logging to method calls automatically. Or to rephrase: the question was basically about handling aspect-oriented programming using Mono.Cecil in .NET. So given this piece of code:

0 Comments

.NET

Visual Studio icon font

Akos Nagy

May 2, 2018

As you can probably see from my blog posts, I'm not really a front-end guy. If push comes to shove, I can manage some basic css, js and html but it's not really my thing. But sometimes, push does come to shove. As I was building

0 Comments

Visual Studio

Using Cognitive Services from Excel via PowerQuery

Akos Nagy

Apr 25, 2018

I have a client that I regularly consult with about various .NET application development tasks. One time they were describing me a particular piece of software that supports product logistics. One part of the process is that products are basically assembled on a conveyor belt. They also showed me the

0 Comments

Throwback Thursday: Typed SQL reader

Akos Nagy

Apr 19, 2018

I've found an old HDD of mine and I got curious: what's on it? I had an old 3,5" HDD to USB adapter lying around and to my surprise, it was still working :) So I put the HDD in it, connected it to my

0 Comments

C#
.NET

Code snippet for databound properties in MVVM

Akos Nagy

Apr 15, 2018

As you can read in the last couple of posts (like this, or this), I've been working with WPF for the last couple of weeks. Not very fun. I'm doing mostly the VMs and that involves a lot of property change notifications. We use the MVVMLight

0 Comments

Stackoverflow Adventures: Why can I not return a reference to a dictionary value?

Akos Nagy

Apr 11, 2018

A while back I found a question on SO about returning a reference to a dictionary value. Here's the code sample from the question that also explains the question itself: public class PropertyManager { private Dictionary<ElementPropertyKey, string> _values = new Dictionary<ElementPropertyKey, string>(); private string[

0 Comments

Danger Zone: The dark side of C# 7 ref return

Akos Nagy

Apr 8, 2018

C# 7.0 introduced the new feature of ref return and ref locals. I have to say, I wasn't sure about the actual usefulness of the feature, but with the recent additions of reference semantics with value types in C# 7.2 I do see how they can

0 Comments

C#

ILSpy plugin to decompile an assembly with Reflection.Emit API calls

Akos Nagy

Apr 2, 2018

Occasionally I do stuff that's just for fun and has little industrial significance (it's sad how often those two factors seem to correlate...). One of my hobbies involves diving deep into the .NET framework and creating fun projects. One of these projects were IL-Boss, whose remnants

0 Comments

C#
.NET

Create a filtered index using Entity Framework Code First

Akos Nagy

Apr 1, 2018

Using Entity Framework Code First, you have the option of specifying indices on columns that are translated to migrations and from that you can generate the SQL script or update the database. With EF 6.2 you can use the new HasIndex() method to define your indices. Before 6.2,

0 Comments

dotNet Falcon update

Akos Nagy

Mar 26, 2018

You might have noticed that in the last few months I haven't put out as many posts as I usually do. Well, here's a post explaining why (or rather, trying to make some excuses). I am working on a couple of things (stay tuned for other

0 Comments

Iterating through dictionaries the better way

Akos Nagy

Mar 24, 2018

Using the right collection type at the right place is a challenging task. In my experience, most people just use List<T or Dictionary<TKey,TValue> most of the time, without thinking about other possibilities. Now that's not to say that these two are not

0 Comments

C#

DispatcherTimer with MVVM in WPF

Akos Nagy

Dec 17, 2017

My speciality is backend, but sometimes I have to do frontend as well. I don't really like it, but I guess that's life. Sometimes I even have to do frontend with ancient technologies like WPF. Again, I guess that's life. So a colleague of

4 Comments

Using IReadonlyDictionary instead of IIndex with Autofac

Akos Nagy

Dec 7, 2017

Dependency injection is awesome. And Autofac is probably the best DI-container out there. It's like magic :) I really like to fiddle around with special registration concepts, like here, here or here. Or down below :) Keyed service registration and resolving Autofac has a great set of features called implicit

3 Comments

Adding bytes in C#

Akos Nagy

Nov 20, 2017

What happens if you run this little piece of code? More specifically, what's the type of the variable 'x'? byte b1=1; byte b2=1; var x=b1+b2; Console.WriteLine(x.GetType()); Well, if you guessed byte, you were wrong. This will actually result in

0 Comments

Extending Linq2Objects GroupBy

Akos Nagy

Nov 15, 2017

GroupBy() is one of the most versatile and underrated Linq standard query operator there is. You probably know the "base" version, which takes in a single parameter in the form of an expression (actually, Func, but that's not the point): public static IEnumerable<IGrouping<

0 Comments

.NET
C#

Modern UI for WPF Autofac based contentloader

Akos Nagy

Nov 15, 2017

I'm not much of a UI guy, but sometimes I have to take part in projects that are front-end heavy. And sometimes this means desktop front-end (there's still a surprisingly heavy demand for these kinds of application). The application I've been working on lately

2 Comments

Implementing interface with auto properties

Akos Nagy

Nov 10, 2017

A cool feature in VS2017: when implementing an interface, you can now use auto properties. Here's what I'm talking about: let's say you have an interface, and you have properties in it. Something like this: public interface IInterface { int MyProperty { get; set; } } Then, you

0 Comments

Analyzing Entity Framework Code First default conventions

Akos Nagy

Nov 7, 2017

In my previous post I told the tale of how I used a wrong (but still awesome) tool to solve a problem. The problem was that I had not known the default conventions when using Entity Framework Code First. To remedy this problem, I decided to take a look at

0 Comments

Stackoverflow Adventures: If all you have is a hammer...

Akos Nagy

Nov 5, 2017

... you see everything as a nail. I'm usually not the one to cite clichés, but for this one I make an exception. It is very, very true, especially in the software engineering business. If all you know is foreach, you don't use SelectMany. If you only

0 Comments

Danger zone: true, false or...

Akos Nagy

Nov 1, 2017

As an MCT I regularly teach courses of different levels. And I have to say, I love teaching — that's the most efficient way to learn :) A participant at one of my advanced courses brought me this little 'problem' (of course, this is not a 'real&

0 Comments

Stackoverflow adventures: Dependency injection on the loose

Akos Nagy

Oct 24, 2017

Sometimes I do these posts where I describe an interesting question on SO. And sometimes I do posts about dependency injection and dependency injection containers. Well, this time, these two series cross-over (the Avengers of blog posts :) ). So Autofac has a number of nice features described as implicit relationship types.

0 Comments

Back to the basics: Overload resolution in C#

Akos Nagy

Oct 21, 2017

During one of my courses, and interesting question came up. Let's say you have a class definition like this: public class Test<T> { public void Method(T parameter) {} public void Method(int parameter) {} } // ... // Test<int> object = new Test<int>(); // object.Method(7)

0 Comments

C#
Teaching

Dependency injection on the loose: Automated injection of method parameters

Akos Nagy

Oct 16, 2017

Yes, you've read it right: in this post I will show you how to inject arguments to method calls and create something like a 'method call' scope. It's not perfect and there are a lot of things that still need to be considered more

0 Comments

Chain of responsiblity and dependency injection

Akos Nagy

Oct 2, 2017

I teach courses about general OO design. One of the classes involves going through all the GoF design patterns. For the last couple of years, I have a new appreciation for the Chain of responsiblity pattern. As I see it, every middleware based arhitecture is kinda-sorta a Chain of responsiblity,

2 Comments

StackOverflow adventures: Checking key equality with generic primary keys in Entity Framework

Akos Nagy

Sep 22, 2017

You might have come across a design like this: you are using Entity Framework Code First, you have a base class that defines the primary key of the entities, and to have a more generic design, the PK is generic. Something like this: public abstract class EntityBase<TKey>

0 Comments

StackOverflow adventures: Don't create non-clustered index for foreign keys with Entity Framework Code First

Akos Nagy

Sep 20, 2017

I found an interesting question on stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46212828/ef6-preventing-not-to-create-index-on-foreign-key OP wanted to find a way to disable index creation for foreign keys. I don't believe there is an easy way to do this; my mind turned right to custom SQL generators and scaffolders. Using

0 Comments

StackOverflow adventures: Specifying default sort order in EF using query interceptors

Akos Nagy

Sep 17, 2017

During the summer weeks, I was a little less active on stackoverflow. But now that the weather is becoming less and less friendly, I've reactivated myself and come across this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45999489/entity-framework-interceptor-default-sorting/46001440#46001440 So basically, OP wanted to find a way to

0 Comments

DependencyInjectionToolset upgrade

Akos Nagy

Sep 11, 2017

I have a little tool published at the VS Marketplace called DependenyInjectionToolset. It's not much; all it does is what its name says: * If you have a constructor parameter that is of an interface type or abstract class type, you can create a private readonly field. * You can

0 Comments

Restoring from BACPAC times out in SSMS

Akos Nagy

Sep 11, 2017

When moving databases from the cloud to on-premise (usually for some advanced 'hacking', performance-tuning or just experimenting), I often use the BACPAC format. It is basically a zip file that encapsulates the schema and the contents of a database. I can export it with SSMS, and then re-import

0 Comments

SQL Server

Want to become a meetup speaker? Here's what you need!

Akos Nagy

Aug 17, 2017

I'm not just a software engineer, I'm also a teacher of software engineering. I feel obligated to share my knowledge with anyone who's in need of it, and, in the process, furthering my own understanding of technology and software engineering. That's why

0 Comments

Encrypting data the easy way using Crypteron

Akos Nagy

Aug 15, 2017

Story of my life: I'm in the middle of some logistics-project for a hospital or a moving company or a security firm or (God-forbid) the government. Specs have been finalized for months, the business model is implemented in EF, we have a test environment filled with test users

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part Seven: Filtering deleted records using Row-Level Security

Akos Nagy

Jul 31, 2017

So in the previous post, I gave some solutions that can be used for filtering the soft deleted entities. The EF Core solution is kinda neat, but the others' have at least one problem: you have to include the IsDeleted column in the model, which leads to abstraction leaking.

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part Six: Filtering deleted records the naive way

Akos Nagy

Jul 29, 2017

OK, so we've got to the point where we have a good solution for flagging deleted entities. But we still have to find a way to filter out the flagged records from query results. Just as a reminder: we need a solution that works for entities, for related

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part Five: Cascade logical delete with cascade update

Akos Nagy

Jul 28, 2017

Microsoft SQL Server has a little-known and little-used feature called cascade update. Just like cascade delete, which deletes the referring records along a FK, the cascade update feature updates the values of the FK in the referring entities if the referred value changes. So let's say you have

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part Four: Automating using stored procedures

Akos Nagy

Jul 27, 2017

In the last post of the series, I identified a good enough solution to handle the EF soft delete scenario with good performance and no abstraction leaking. The solution itself contains a well-defined process, but ideally this process should be automatized as much as possible. Just a reminder about the

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part Three: Using stored procedures

Akos Nagy

Jul 25, 2017

In Part 1 of this series I discussed what logical delete is, in Part 2 I gave a solution that is kinda good for cases when you don't have cascading requirements. But in that post I pointed out the solutions inadequacy to handle the cascading situation. Here in

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part Two: Flagging deleted Entities with a naive solution

Akos Nagy

Jul 18, 2017

So in my previous post in the series, I described what soft delete is and what challenges need to be overcome when implementing it using Entity Framework (since EF has no explicit support for this). Now, in part two, I want to discuss a naive solution — one that might satisfy

0 Comments

Entity Framework Logical Delete Part One: Intro and Questions

Akos Nagy

Jul 17, 2017

I've been planning to write a blog post about how to achieve the so called "logical delete" or "soft delete" when using Entity Framework. This is the kind of requirement you have when you are not allowed to physically delete records from your database

2 Comments

LinqPad DocumentDb (now CosmosDb) driver

Akos Nagy

May 22, 2017

If you are a .NET programmer, you are probably familiar with LinqPad. I myself find it useful in some situations (and there are others, when not) and I do use it myself. For a while I've been looking for a new project that I could hack on in

6 Comments

StackOverflow Adventures: Add custom info to Web API help page

Akos Nagy

May 1, 2017

I like stackoverflow. It provides me a way to keep in touch with the community, meet other schools of thought and test my knowledge on occasion. I like the interesting problems and questions. Take this one for example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42691154/provide-documentation-for-asp-net-web-api-method-with-a-dynamic-query-string The question goes like this: I&

5 Comments

StackOverflow Adventures: DocumentDb and inheritance

Akos Nagy

Mar 27, 2017

I stumbled upon this question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42858166/deserialize-json-into-multiple-inherited-classes/42858968#42858968 Here's the gist of it: OP wanted to store instances of different descendants of a class in DocumentDb and then read them back — but it wasn't working. So what's

4 Comments

Stealing time in SQL Server

Akos Nagy

Mar 20, 2017

Here's a question for you: what is the output of this simple script in T-SQL if I run it on SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition (or any other edition and any other version, for that matter): declare @t1 datetime='2017-03-20 12:46:37.000'; declare @t2

0 Comments

SQL Server

StackOverflow Adventures: DocumentDb response chunking

Akos Nagy

Mar 17, 2017

Not long ago I stumbled upon this interesting question on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42600008/how-to-get-more-than-100-query-results-with-azure-documentdb-rest-api The asker used the REST API of Azure DocumentDb to query some data, but they could only get back the first 100 documents. If they used the .NET SDK, they could get all

0 Comments

Entity Framework Code First: Relationship mapping

Akos Nagy

Mar 11, 2017

I guess there's really no point in stating again how much I think EF CF is awesome (just check this post or this post). There's a lot of magic in EF CF — and of course there are more straightforward things. Mapping entities is one of the

0 Comments

StackOverflow adventures: Entity Framework Code First advanced mapping scenarios

Akos Nagy

Mar 5, 2017

A couple of days back I was lucky enough to answer this question on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42532083/how-to-map-a-property-to-a-different-table-using-entity-framework So basically the question was about how to split an entity into two tables. And this let me to writing this blog post on advanced mapping scenarios. When you

2 Comments

.NET Workbooks: 101 Linq samples

Akos Nagy

Mar 1, 2017

Just yesterday I did a post on something called Xamarin Workbooks. In the post I elaborate on how cool this is and how useful I think this tool will be during my classes. Ever since a thread in my brain-process has been working on finding cool new ideas to present

0 Comments

.NET
C#

.NET Workbooks: Entity Framework Model Explorer

Akos Nagy

Feb 28, 2017

I've been a long time follower of Scott Hanselman. I mean, who hasn't? The guy has a very good sense of technology and has some great insights about .NET stuff, but beyond that, he has a special attitude towards life in general (as far as I

2 Comments

Auditing EF Code First Migrations

Akos Nagy

Feb 26, 2017

EF Code First is awesome. I cannot emphasize enough how useful, intuitive and overall amazing it is (though I tried to do just that in this post, so I won't start it again). One problem that usually comes up against EF Code First is that you cannot handle

2 Comments

Publish obfuscated and signed assemblies with ClickOnce

Akos Nagy

Feb 19, 2017

Let me start off by saying: ClickOnce is not awesome. Or at least I think so. Unfortunately, when it comes to publishing thick-clients (yes, I still have to do that on occassion, like we used to in the 2000s), there is no good alternative. Everything else I know about has

6 Comments

.NET

Dependency injection on the loose - Load different versions of components at runtime

Akos Nagy

Feb 16, 2017

So a while back I was presented with an interesting task. It is not uncommon that if you have some code, it starts to evolve over time. You introduce changes — and with the changes a new version of your code is born. And this presents many challenges. The challenge that

0 Comments

Azure Automation Job for Index Maintenance

Akos Nagy

Feb 14, 2017

Indices are good (yes, technically that is the plural form of index). They help you when you search for things - and that's mostly what databases are all about. But indices are only good if they are maintained. When you do your inserts and deletes, indices can become

1 Comment

Azure

Adding custom parts to an xlsx workbook

Akos Nagy

Feb 2, 2017

A while back I came across an interesting task. Basically there was an xml document which we used in one of our applications. It was a special resource file: the structure was maintained by us, but the contents were maintained by the customer. One day we decided that it would

0 Comments

.NET
C#

Danger zone: calling the base version of an overriden method

Akos Nagy

Jan 30, 2017

Welcome to the danger zone: This is something that you can do, but you shouldn't. It's fun, exciting, shows you're technically experienced and are a real .NET internals-guru type of guy - but you don't need to take unnecessary risks if you

0 Comments

C#
.NET

A better way for optimistic concurrency in Entity Framework Code First

Akos Nagy

Jan 30, 2017

Hi there :) Here's the thing: I love Entity Framework. I know it has its limitations, but it's super fun to work with — or at least it has been for me ever since I started using it. More specifically, ever since Code First came out. Code First

1 Comment

Introducing dotnet Falcon

Akos Nagy

Jan 16, 2017

Welcome, dear potential reader. I know you are probably busy, so I'll keep this short. Who am I? I am a software engineer, more specifically, a .NET software engineer. I specialize in back-end development and Azure. The other pieces of information are probably not so relevant, but just

0 Comments

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