Shepard Road

I saw a feature I was not aware of in a Pluralsightvid that I was watching recently that I thought was really cool, especially for a backend C# guy like me who is getting back into web development after a while, using ASP.Net Core 2.x and Aurelia, which adopts an opinionated convention over configuration approach to its design. This feature has to do with file nesting, which in this case would be…

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Issues Updating Xamarin in Visual Studio

Just a quick note to hopefully help prevent a major time-suck in updating the Xamarin components in Visual Studio. Scenario: you open up your Xamarin project in Visual Studio, and a notification appears in your system tray saying that there is a Xamarin for Visual Studio update available, and to “click here” to install it. You click, but nothing happens.

After running into this situation, I did…

Test Runners Executing Tests Multiple Times in Visual Studio

A quick note to any of you who are running into issues with your tests running multiple times in Visual Studio:  Check your packages folder (i.e. NuGet) and look for the folder belonging to the testing framework you are using—if you see more than one version of your testing framework in there, get rid of all but the one you are using. 

This cleared up my issue…

Hope this helps!

ReSharper and Source Control Providers In Visual Studio

Here’s another quick one to file under pain points and lessons learned…

While I figured this out a while ago, I just tripped over it again and thought I would throw a quick post out there to document it.  So, I am working in Visual Studio (happens to be 2013, but I suspect this applies across the board) and have ReSharper installed.  I go to the left-hand margin of the editor, left-click on the…

Avoiding an Entity Framework Rabbit Hole

I spent some time over the past 24 hours or so running down a rabbit hole chasing a funky little issue with Entity Framework (a version 6 flavor, but I am thinking this applies to all versions running Code First).  The short story is that it dawned on me that whenever you try to access a given EF model on a DbContext instance, that EF will evaluate the metadata (i.e. attributes on the model,…

Entity Framework Automatic Migrations Are Not for Production Use

With all of the information available, the countless posts on blogs and in forums about how automatic migrations work, how to use them and how to get around issues with using this toolset, there just doesn’t seem to be much conversation about the intended use. I get how automatic migrations work and can see a niche use for them,…

Column Order in Relational Database Tables

  I have seen questions, and even debate, around column order in relational database tables and whether it is important or not.  The problem with these arguments is not whether or not column order is important or not, rather where any requirement for column order is implemented and enforced.  After reading a Stack Overflow answerregarding this question, this distinction started to become clear to…

Xamarin Studio and Default Startup Projects

I working on a new mobile project in Xamarin this past weekend and started running into a strange issue that had me going in circles.  I was trying to debug my project in Xamarin Studio, but the iOS simulator was not starting up.  So, I tried deploying to my iPhone, but the device pulldown to the right of the Configuration pulldown was greyed out.  I was unable to debug my app and was starting to…

Looping Through Fields in a Record Returned from a LINQ Query

One situation that does not have an intuitive solution to is looping through fields in a result set returned by a LINQ query.  While the strong typing of the fields returned in these records is nice and convenient, there are times where I don’t want everything returned from the table.  This isn’t much of an issue when you only want a handful of fields, however when the table has, say, 50, 60, or…