Listen to me on the Day 2 Cloud podcast
I was invited to chat with the Packet Pushers folk on ‘OpenTelemetry – Getting From Visibility To Observability With Ben Hall’. Looks like I pushed a show th...
Posts by Year
2023
2022
OpenTelemetry, The Missing Ingredient
At its core, OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral standard for telemetry. But it also provides a complete end-to-end implementation for generating, emitt...
The Modern Observability Problem
The observability problem - Why is the system exhibiting this behaviour?
`Charbonneau Loops' and government IT contracting
An interesting read about outsourcing and in-house capacity, relevant to us in IT.
GitOps with Terraform, GitHub and Azure
A 3-part series published on CodeProject that demonstrates how to construct a complete end-to-end GitOps workflow using Terraform plans, GitHub, GitHub Actio...
2021
Manual Docker Setup on Windows
An alternative using WSL 2, where Docker Desktop is not available to you in Windows
.NET 6 LINQ Improvements - Count Performance
.NET 6 introduces new LINQ method to count the number of elements in a sequence more efficiently.
.NET 6 LINQ Improvements - Default Values
.NET 6 introduces new LINQ overloads that allows us to specify default values more succinctly.
.NET 6 LINQ Improvements - *By
New to LINQ in .NET 6 - Easier to work with complex objects
.NET Quarterly News Update - 2021.2
Useful things you may have missed in 2021 Q2 from the .NET community.
.NET Quarterly News Update - 2021.1
Useful things you may have missed in 2021 Q1 from the .NET community.
ASP.NET Core Authentication: Fail Secure
Reverse your approach to enforcing authentication on controllers, endpoints, actions and Razor Pages with global settings.
System.Text.Encodings.Web Vulnerability
Remote code execution vulnerability in .NET Core and effected versions of System.Text.Encodings.Web
Trusting Visual Studio Projects
A reminder to be cautious and consider the warning window that comes up for Visual Studio projects from external sources.
Automatic updates in Windows for .NET Core and .NET 5
Making it that little bit easier to keep up with security patching.
2019
Privacy in GitHub commit history
Keeping your email private and out of GitHub commit history.
.NET Core Lifecycles
I get regular queries about decisions on .NET Core versions so I have shared a snapshot of the key points to help you make an informed decision here. Remembe...
CodeProject MVP 2019 Award
So very happy to have received my certificate for CodeProject MVP 2019 MVA Most Valuable Author Award
2018
A Re-Introduction to C# References
Reviewing what we need to know pre- and post- C# 7 features about the type system and references in particular, while correcting common misconceptions along ...
.NET Performance Tip – Benchmarking
Micro-optimising has a bad reputation although I’d argue that knowledge of such things can help you write better code. We should also make the distinction cl...
.NET Performance Tip
Know Your Garbage Collection Options. An under-utilised setting that can offer substantial performance gains.
.NET Garbage Collection. A Super-Simplified Explanation.
Garbage collection is so often at the root (excuse the pun) of many performance problems, very often because of misunderstanding, so please do set aside time...
C# Debug vs. Release builds
Builds and debugging in Visual Studio - from novice to expert in one blog article
C# Async/Await
Async/await has been part of C# since C# 5.0 yet many developers have yet to explore how it works under the covers, which I would recommend for any syntactic...
2017
.NET String Interning
Introduction
Erratic Behaviour from .NET MemoryCache Expiration Demystified
On a recent project I experienced first-hand, how the .NET MemoryCache class, when used with either absolute or sliding expiration, can produce some unpredic...
FileSystemWatcher vs. Locked Files
Another Problem with FileSystemWatcher.
FileSystemWatcher is a Bit Broken
A robust solution for FileSystemWatcher firing events multiple times.
FileSystemWatcher is Confusing
NotifyFilters enumeration explained.
C# Image class extension methods for physical print size in millimetres
We had a business need for the actual print size of an image in millimetres.
Persisting multiple checkbox states in session Storage (using jQuery)
A quick fix using session storage on the client.
2016
Using FakeItEasy with Entity Framework 6
In EF6, DbSet gained an additional protected internal constructor. So instead of creating lots of mocks, we mark the DbSet properties virtual, allowing FakeI...