In a lot of projects I have been on I’ve seen the following approaches when it comes to application logging in test: The most popular option: It is completely ignored, either by pumping it into a mock or a NullLogger It is tested by verifying that the correct log messages are written. This is usually done to satisfy a ‘strict’ mocking framework. Neither of these options are ideal in my opinion. …

Recently I wanted to use GitVersion to determine the version number for a project. To keep the project self-contained I installed GitVersion as a .NET Local Tool. However, when trying to get the generated version numbers through FAKE it didn’t work. Unfortunately, the current version of FAKE does not support running GitVersion as a dotnet tool. To bridge that gap I wrote the following FAKE script to get it to work. …

Recently I wanted to verify that my data access layer could properly read and write to a SQL Server database, and I wanted to have these tests automated. I wanted to answer these questions: Can my DbContext roundtrip entities to the database and back? Does the schema in my migration scripts match the expected schema in my code? (follows from 1) Can my migration scripts be applied to the database correctly? …

As a side project, I am working on a web application that I want to host in Azure eventually. There is a ton of documentation available around Azure but instructions vary by product. I have documented the steps I needed to run a web application in Azure. To make it easier to automate the deployment steps I am avoiding the Azure portal. I want to script these steps later so that I can automate my deployments. …

When trying to deploy a simple web application and Azure SQL database through Azure DevOps pipelines, I wanted to use a system managed application identity to authorize the web application to access the database. This requires running something like the following SQL script on the Azure SQL database. CREATE USER [<identity-name>] FROM EXTERNAL PROVIDER; ALTER ROLE db_datareader ADD MEMBER [<identity-name>]; ALTER ROLE db_datawriter ADD MEMBER [<identity-name>]; ALTER ROLE db_ddladmin ADD MEMBER [<identity-name>]; I was having a lot of trouble getting the Azure SqlCmd task to work, while the error(s) it was showing was not helpful at all. …

Recently at work, I had to implement some functionality that required the use of Guid identifiers that were stored in SQL Server. The Guids were generated in the application and used as an alternative key / external identifier for other systems. To avoid excessive index fragmentation, we opted to use the GuidComb variant using a generator from the NHibernate project. The GuidCombGenerator generates Guid values that have a timestamp embedded into the last 6 bytes. …

As a side project, I’ve been working on my implementation of a FoundationDB client for .NET. I want to have tests to verify things are working properly, and for local development that isn’t such a problem since I usually have a FoundationDB server installed. However, when I want to run these tests on a build server I do not want to enforce installing FoundationDB in the build environment, things should just work. …