Dapr is an impressive set of APIs for building distributed applications with any language and platform. It provides a set of building blocks that you can use to build microservices. Dapr is based on sidecar architecture. Meaning that you need to run a Dapr sidecar for each of your applications. How do you debug your Dapr apps effectively? If you have been using PowerShell scripts to run and attach your debugger, you know how tedious and error-prone it can be. Ready to see how to use Rider or Visual Studio to debug your Dapr apps with ease and confidence?

With my team, we like to keep our C# code base updated. So, recently we went to .NET 7 and C# 11. At the same time, we were still adopting some of the new capabilities of .NET 6 and C# 10. Our code base is large, so it takes some time. One of the new features that we planned to use was the ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull method, which throws an exception if an argument is null. In this post, I will show you how I effortlessly did that refactoring by letting the machine work and not the human 😁 (me). In the past, I used the same approach to migrate lots of code that used Assert.True() to Assert.That(, Is.True) and for some other even more complex cases. We will use ReSharper and Rider for that.

On October 24th, Docker announced the support of WASM and WASI in a new technical preview release. I wanted to try it out and see how it works with .NET 7. If you want to know more about WASM and WASI you can read the introduction from my previous post, "Using WASM and WASI to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W".

I am using a tool called logseq to manage my notes. It is a fantastic tool, and I would like to be able to extend it. I am not an expert web developer, but I am a .NET developer. I would like to be able to write plugins for logseq using .NET and C#. I have found a way to do it using WebAssembly. In this post, I am going to show you how to do it.

.NET Aspire 9.1 was just released on February 25th, 2025. It comes with great new dashboard features, and there is more! One feature I am particularly interested in is the ability to use Dev Containers.

In this post, I will show you how to use the new .NET Aspire 9.1 with a Dev Container and JetBrains Rider. You could also use Visual Studio Code.

In my earlier posts, I've demonstrated how to install Ollama using the Windows installer. However, for developers, there's a more streamlined method to set up Ollama on your machine.

In this blog post, we'll explore how to run DeepSeek-R1 by harnessing the capabilities of .NET Aspire alongside Ollama on your local environment.

I like very much the idea of a .NET Generic Host in the MSDN documentation:

An object that encapsulates an app's resources, such as:

• Dependency injection (DI)
• Logging
• Configuration
• IHostedService implementations

At work, we are planning to migrate our WPF application from .NET Framework 4.7 to .NET Core 3.0. The main reason for doing so is that it was always a big pain to organize the updates of the .NET Framework on our customer machines. So being able to bundle .NET Core with our application is a big plus for us. Then, for sure, we are looking for the performance improvements brought by .NET Core and finally the new capabilities brought by the fast pace of innovation of .NET Core.

Let' see in this blog post the new possibility offered by .NET Core 3.0 preview 2 to load and unload assemblies at run time using AssemblyLoadContext.

On Saturday, June 2, 2018, I had the chance to participate in the .NET Core Community online Hackathon.

As I got up really early this Saturday morning, I took the opportunity to participate. My goal was to see something new and learn a bit about how .NET Core is built and gain some new experience.

In the past in my team, we were storing the Telerik assemblies into our SVN repository then in Git! I wasn't happy about that for a really long time. Each releases our repository was growing much more than it was needed for nothing!

I finally invested time to migrate our build from a heteroclite mixture of MSBuild, TeamCity build steps and whatever to something that really delight me: Cake (C# Make).

As said in a past post: Yeah!!! :-) Publications are working, I am working on the new publishing tool for my website Tech Head Brothers, and today I reached another milestone: The tool is now installed on Laurent Duveau notebook and he is able to post directly from Word 2003.

If you are using ReSharper from JetBrains and you have some difficulties to remember the different available shortcuts then I recommend you this Pdf file:

As you certainly know I you sometimes read my blog I am absolutely addicted to that tool and can't work without it anymore in Visual Studio 2005.

So I am happy to announce that Jetbrains finally released ReSharper 2.5. This version is for Visual Studio 2005 only. So what's new on this new version?

Patrice Lamarche had the opportunity to interview Christoff Wittig, CEO of db4objects.

db4objects sponsors the open source database db4o which is a native object database engine for .NET and Java.

I have quickly posted a video showing the insertion of an image and source code using the Tech Head Brothers Authoring tool on YouTube.

<YouTube id="pqLqv_sSOgo" class="yt-width" /> <br/>

This demo demonstrates offline preview and the ease of inserting images and source code in authored articles.

Today is a big day with a really cool milestone for Tech Head Brothers website.

First I am able to publish/update content on the site with my new publishing tool; a word template using vsto 2005 and secured web services. This piece of code let me publish content with pictures, colorized source code, zip files for sample applictions and this directly out of Word 2003. Really cool!!!

I just updated the source code of my Tech Head Brothers Authoring tool on Codeplex.

Now it uses Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in place of WSE 3.0 and Word 2007.

What are the options when you need to integrate Windows legacy code in a heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

The proposed problem was to expose a set of Windows C++ DLLs to a global SOA platform written in Java. Those DLLs would be then exposed as backend computation services.

What is the difference between this code

using (var fileStream = new FileStream(settingsFilename, FileMode.Open))
{
    return ReadSettings(fileStream);
}

The other day I faced a strange issue when I wanted to add a service reference to the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool. The code generated wasn’t compiling with errors located in the file Reference.cs.

Drilling down the issue I figured out that the default namespace, TechHeadBrothers.Word, was the issue. It was just added at some place and at other not.

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

I have reached now another step on the new authoring tool for Tech Head Brothers portal by having some authors installing this new version and starting beta testing it. Has you can see, with the following twit, it seems that the tool is on the good way:

From Rédo (french blog)

Soma just published some info about Microsoft “dogfooding” VS 2010 and .NET 4

There are some interesting statistics and explanation of what Soma think were critical factors to success.

My previous blog posts talks about built-in container support in the .NET SDK. It allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers. We saw how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry.

Today, I want to show you how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions. It brings us to the next level of automation.

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK that allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers.

For this blog post, I will explain how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry. It is possible to publish to different container registries, such as Docker Hub, GitHub, Azure Container Registry, or your own private registry. I will show you how to publish to GitHub Packages / Container Registry, but the process is similar for other registries.

This blog post will help you learn how to leverage the .NET SDK's built-in container support to effortlessly distribute and run your .NET applications in the cloud using Docker. Stay tuned!

Are you looking for a fast and easy way to create and run .NET applications using Docker containers without writing any Dockerfile? If so, you will be glad to know that Microsoft has introduced a new feature of the .NET SDK 7.0.200 that makes it possible to create and publish OCI container images directly from your project file. We have seen how ".NET 7 SDK built-in container support and Ubuntu Chiseled" can be used together. It lets us create small and secure containers for our .NET applications easily. We went from a first docker image of 216MB down to 48.3 MB. That is more than a 77% reduction in size. .NET SDK 7.0.200 bring some new capabilities. We will explore some in this post.

End of summer 2022, the .NET team at Microsoft announced two things related to containers: .NET in Chiseled Ubuntu containers and then a week after built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK. I have talked about both topics on two episodes of the French podcast devdevdev.net by my friend Richard Clark. In this post, I will explain what those are and how to combine them.

Now that we've explored how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications, how to write your own Standard Input/Output (STDIO) MCP server in C# using the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk, and how we can dockerize your .NET C# MCP server to be able to distribute it for use by AI clients. It's time to take a step further and explore how to leverage Server-Sent Events (SSE) MCP servers so that we can deploy them remotely, for example on a Raspberry Pi.

My previous post showed how easy it is to develop a .NET C# MCP server and write a client able to communicate with it. Now, the question is how we can distribute our MCP server to be used by AI clients. In this post, we'll leverage the knowledge acquired from my previous posts to explore how to dockerize your .NET C# MCP server.

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, Ollama, and a nuget package called mcpdotnet to interact with an existing MCP Server. Since then, mcpdotnet has been elevated to become the "official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients, maintained by Microsoft".

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables seamless integration between AI systems and various data sources, allowing developers to create context-aware applications. In this post, we'll explore how to build a simple MCP server using C# and the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk library, which simplifies the process of creating and managing MCP servers.

In the previous post "Leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI for Tool Calling in C#", we explored how to create custom tools that enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrated how integrating these technologies enables developers to build applications with advanced AI capabilities, facilitating more complex interactions.

In this post, we'll take a step further and explore how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications. We'll continue using Ollama to run local AI models.

As said when we launched Jobping Open Source Short Urls Service, we at Jobping are committed to open source.

So last week we announced  StickyBeak, you might read more on the blog of Mark - Introduction to StickyBeak

I read on MSDN Forums that it is not possible to use other configuration than Release and Debug. This is wrong.

I am using it for Tech Head Brothers Portal, what you have to take care of is how you set your configuration. On the following picture you see how I defined a new Staging configuration and set the Web Deployment Project WebApplication.csproj_deploy to build using this configuration.

My old build script wasn't working after the migration to this new version and you will find in this post the different adaptation that I had to do.

Add missing ToolsVersion as following:

YSlow is a new web tool published by Yahoo. It let you test a total of 13 rules against your web site to check if it is efficient.

YSlow is an addin to Firefox integrated in the web development tool Firebug.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

I read on MSDN Forums that it is not possible to use other configuration than Release and Debug. This is wrong.

I am using it for Tech Head Brothers Portal, what you have to take care of is how you set your configuration. On the following picture you see how I defined a new Staging configuration and set the Web Deployment Project WebApplication.csproj_deploy to build using this configuration.

My old build script wasn't working after the migration to this new version and you will find in this post the different adaptation that I had to do.

Add missing ToolsVersion as following:

No new controls but some great fixes!

If you are using URL rewriting you might know that you have to take care about the way you reference resources has written in the Scott Guthrie post; Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET:

Handling CSS and Image Reference Correctly

As you might know, I am running the French .NET portal Tech Head Brothers and I am always searching for good way to optimize it and make it run better.

Following the post of Jeremy Zawodny's blog: "How To Add Good Expires Headers to Images in Apache 1.3" I decided to check this on my server running Tech Head Brothers on IIS 6.0.

If you place on a web page a ModalPopup and a Silverlight control, you might end up with the ModalPopup hided by the Silverlight control.

To avoid this at the time you call Sys.Silverlight.createObjectEx you need to give the following property to true:

No new controls but some great fixes!

This has been a long awaited release and has lots of important bug fixes. We were unable to get the Test Framework ready in time and hope to get that out later. The release notes talk about it in detail at this new sample website location. The binaries can be downloaded from the Toolkit Release page.

Please try it out and let us know if you run into any issues.

As you might know, I am running the French .NET portal Tech Head Brothers and I am always searching for good way to optimize it and make it run better.

Following the post of Jeremy Zawodny's blog: "How To Add Good Expires Headers to Images in Apache 1.3" I decided to check this on my server running Tech Head Brothers on IIS 6.0.

If you place on a web page a ModalPopup and a Silverlight control, you might end up with the ModalPopup hided by the Silverlight control.

To avoid this at the time you call Sys.Silverlight.createObjectEx you need to give the following property to true:

Now that we've explored how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications, how to write your own Standard Input/Output (STDIO) MCP server in C# using the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk, and how we can dockerize your .NET C# MCP server to be able to distribute it for use by AI clients. It's time to take a step further and explore how to leverage Server-Sent Events (SSE) MCP servers so that we can deploy them remotely, for example on a Raspberry Pi.

End of summer 2022, the .NET team at Microsoft announced two things related to containers: .NET in Chiseled Ubuntu containers and then a week after built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK. I have talked about both topics on two episodes of the French podcast devdevdev.net by my friend Richard Clark. In this post, I will explain what those are and how to combine them.

WebAssembly (WASM) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) are opening new opportunities for developers. .NET developers became familiar with WASM when Blazor WebAssembly was released. Blazor WebAssembly runs client-side in the browser on a WebAssembly-based .NET runtime. WASI is bringing WASM out of the browser world by providing a system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web. It is a standard for how WASM modules interact with the host environment. This post will show you how to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W using WASM and WASI.

In the last post, we have seen how to call a service from another service using the Dapr .NET SDK. In this one, we will have a look at a possible way to simplify the development of the client code using Refit, the automatic type-safe REST library for .NET Core, Xamarin, and .NET.

Following my previous posts on ASP.NET Core RC2, Docker and HipChat Connect add-on and Deploying Docker containers running ASP.NET Core RC2 to Microsoft Azure Cloud I needed, as promised in the last post, to come with a solution to secure the whole with an HTTPS certificate!

Following my previous post on ASP.NET Core RC2, Docker and HipChat Connect add-on I wanted to learn the next step which is to deploy my Docker container on the Microsoft Azure Cloud!

This weekend ASP.NET Core RC2 was starting to show up! And it finally was released today. Get it fresh from here. We had here a long three days weekend with quite awful gray clouds and cold weather for the season, so a perfect excuse to get started!

I previously talked about “Running Github Hubot on a Windows machine”, “Using Github hubot and Appharbor service hook to get deployment status in Campfire/HipChat rooms” or even “Starting TeamCity builds from HipChat using Github Hubot”.

All those solution rely on an external chat service either Altassian HipChat or 37signals Campfire.

After publishing this for Starting ASP.NET Development Server from a right click in explorer it is time to do it for IIS Express.

Tonight trying out Orchard 1.1 I just wanted to start by right clicking and getting IIS Express fired so that I can test the 1.1 version.

Last week I had an issue in Visual Studio 2010 debugger in some projects only! When I was looking at the value of variables I was getting an error message saying “Unable to evaluate the expression”!

Searching on Connect I have found that someone else had the same issue! Not really a good sign, “Debuging (Evalutation) stops working at times - Unable to evaluate the expression”. I have the same configuration, same issue and can reproduce what is described:

As said when we launched Jobping Open Source Short Urls Service, we at Jobping are committed to open source.

So last week we announced  StickyBeak, you might read more on the blog of Mark - Introduction to StickyBeak

Today TeamCity was showing me one functional test failure on my WPF application.

I already discussed about this problem here: White’s tip for your automated WPF functional tests

Yesterday evening I found a set of Google blog posts talking about web application acceptance testing which reflect Google experience through “Several years of experience across multiple project teams”.

This reflects a lot of points I brought into our discussions either at Innoveo or Jobping; best practices, screen/page object, dev. language, recording/coding, BDD..

I previously talked about “Running Github Hubot on a Windows machine”, “Using Github hubot and Appharbor service hook to get deployment status in Campfire/HipChat rooms” or even “Starting TeamCity builds from HipChat using Github Hubot”.

All those solution rely on an external chat service either Altassian HipChat or 37signals Campfire.

After writing about “Running your TeamCity builds from PowerShell for any Git branch” I’d like to talk about another integration which is using Github Hubot so that the build could be started directly form a chat room.

I love TeamCity and use it since a while to automate my build/release processes. As human we should never do the work a machine can do, we have certainly better and more interesting things to do.

Yesterday evening I found a set of Google blog posts talking about web application acceptance testing which reflect Google experience through “Several years of experience across multiple project teams”.

This reflects a lot of points I brought into our discussions either at Innoveo or Jobping; best practices, screen/page object, dev. language, recording/coding, BDD..

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Last week I had an issue in Visual Studio 2010 debugger in some projects only! When I was looking at the value of variables I was getting an error message saying “Unable to evaluate the expression”!

Searching on Connect I have found that someone else had the same issue! Not really a good sign, “Debuging (Evalutation) stops working at times - Unable to evaluate the expression”. I have the same configuration, same issue and can reproduce what is described:

What are the options when you need to integrate Windows legacy code in a heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

The proposed problem was to expose a set of Windows C++ DLLs to a global SOA platform written in Java. Those DLLs would be then exposed as backend computation services.

From Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (tips from the SQL Azure — Getting Started forum, this post) :

Please be aware that SSMS is not supported with SQL Azure yet. However, you can use the following workaround for the time being:

As you might have guessed reading some of my older posts, I like to automate things which I believe a computer should do in place of humans.

For some time now I slightly modified my development workflow and I have seen a great improvement in my developers life:

• it started by using Git Svn in front of our central Svn

I blogged yesterday about “BDD web application testing using easyB and Sahi”

I was asked to provide a sample, so here it is!

I already talked about the way we are testing our web application at Jobping in the following posts “ASP.NET MVC 2, MSpec and Watin ” and ”Automated functional tests using Watin and MSpec”.

The other day I landed on the DZone page “Automated Browser Testing: What's in Your Toolkit?” In the list of around 10 tools I knew some of them but there were 3 I didn’t knew. So I decided to go on and read about those 3. In this list there were Sahi which got me with those three sentences:

Yesterday evening I found a set of Google blog posts talking about web application acceptance testing which reflect Google experience through “Several years of experience across multiple project teams”.

This reflects a lot of points I brought into our discussions either at Innoveo or Jobping; best practices, screen/page object, dev. language, recording/coding, BDD..

Early in my journey in developing software, I used to start a project by setting first a way to build my software automatically each time I did a set of changes. Long, very long ago, I used scripts scheduled to run. When JetBrains shipped TeamCity I started to use it extensively for my projects, here is my first post about "Set Up a Build Computer using VisualSVN, Team City, MsTest, NUnit" from March 21, 2008, but used it since version 1.0. Later on, I also used Azure Pipelines to build Git Diff Margin and also GitHub Actions, for example, to build and deploy those pages.

Now that we've explored how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications, how to write your own Standard Input/Output (STDIO) MCP server in C# using the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk, and how we can dockerize your .NET C# MCP server to be able to distribute it for use by AI clients. It's time to take a step further and explore how to leverage Server-Sent Events (SSE) MCP servers so that we can deploy them remotely, for example on a Raspberry Pi.

My previous post showed how easy it is to develop a .NET C# MCP server and write a client able to communicate with it. Now, the question is how we can distribute our MCP server to be used by AI clients. In this post, we'll leverage the knowledge acquired from my previous posts to explore how to dockerize your .NET C# MCP server.

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, Ollama, and a nuget package called mcpdotnet to interact with an existing MCP Server. Since then, mcpdotnet has been elevated to become the "official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients, maintained by Microsoft".

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables seamless integration between AI systems and various data sources, allowing developers to create context-aware applications. In this post, we'll explore how to build a simple MCP server using C# and the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk library, which simplifies the process of creating and managing MCP servers.

In the previous post "Leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI for Tool Calling in C#", we explored how to create custom tools that enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrated how integrating these technologies enables developers to build applications with advanced AI capabilities, facilitating more complex interactions.

In this post, we'll take a step further and explore how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications. We'll continue using Ollama to run local AI models.

I previously talked about “Running Github Hubot on a Windows machine”, “Using Github hubot and Appharbor service hook to get deployment status in Campfire/HipChat rooms” or even “Starting TeamCity builds from HipChat using Github Hubot”.

All those solution rely on an external chat service either Altassian HipChat or 37signals Campfire.

Appharbor provides a service hook which let’s you get informed when a build is finished sending both succeeded and failed builds.

We wanted to use this to get informed in our Campfire / HipChat room so that our distributed team can be informed about builds status without having to go to AppHarbor web site.

As you might have guessed reading some of my older posts, I like to automate things which I believe a computer should do in place of humans.

I already talked about this topic in a previous post, Building ClickOnce with TeamCity, which was about .NET framework 3.5. This time I will talk about .NET framework 4.

As always when you change from one .NET framework version to another, there are some more things to install on our build server than just the .NET Framework.

Tonight we got the following issue on our TeamCity build server which produce different ClickOnce setups :

c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3652, 9): error MSB3482: An error occurred while signing: Failed to sign ....\Tests\Output\bin\DeployClickOnce\app.publish\setup.exe.

The other day I published different posts about the way I automated our build process at Innoveo Solutions to generate different ClickOnce setup using TeamCity:

Build multiple ClickOnce deployment packages using MSBuild and Team City

The other day I posted about Build ClickOnce deployment packages using MSBuild and Team City, and there were some things that I didn’t like in my way of doing it.

I have multiple ClickOnce deployment packages created using TeamCity and MSBuild but each ClickOnce package has its own Application Revision due to the usage of TeamCity BUILD_NUMBER server build property.

I previously talked about “Running Github Hubot on a Windows machine”, “Using Github hubot and Appharbor service hook to get deployment status in Campfire/HipChat rooms” or even “Starting TeamCity builds from HipChat using Github Hubot”.

All those solution rely on an external chat service either Altassian HipChat or 37signals Campfire.

Appharbor provides a service hook which let’s you get informed when a build is finished sending both succeeded and failed builds.

We wanted to use this to get informed in our Campfire / HipChat room so that our distributed team can be informed about builds status without having to go to AppHarbor web site.

In the past in my team, we were storing the Telerik assemblies into our SVN repository then in Git! I wasn't happy about that for a really long time. Each releases our repository was growing much more than it was needed for nothing!

When I migrated our build to Cake (C# Make) we had one requirement which was to upload some of the build output's artifacts to DropBox at the end of the build.

I finally invested time to migrate our build from a heteroclite mixture of MSBuild, TeamCity build steps and whatever to something that really delight me: Cake (C# Make).

At Jobping and Innoveo we are using TeamCity from JetBrains to automate our different builds.

Today I was asked by my colleague Roy the following interesting question “Can I rerun an old build?”

This week I started the Coursera course Functional Programming Principles in Scala with Martin Odersky as instructor.

One of my first step was to have JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA working with the Scala programming language so that I can work on the course assignments using my preferred IDE.

The other day I wanted to send per email some code to a friend which doesn’t use Git. He is using Svn and I use Git Svn in front of this Svn repository. Why I do that? Don’t get me started…

So he couldn’t pull from my repo and we were kind of stuck. Really?!? For sure not, here was the goal I set as I am sure this will happen some other time: having the computer work for me. What a strange idea you would say! Yeah, the computer working for you. At the end aren’t we here to make the cool things and let the computer do the boring things?

For some time now I slightly modified my development workflow and I have seen a great improvement in my developers life:

• it started by using Git Svn in front of our central Svn

Sometime ago I moved “away” from subversion has my Version Control System (VCS) because I felt not free of my way of working with it. I found a great was to improve my work experience by using Git Svn in front of our central Subversion repository.

I started my experimentation with Mercurial and Hg Svn because I was already using Mercurial for my personal projects. I hit some much the wall with Hg Svn that I decided quite quickly to go and try Git Svn. I had no experience with Git at that time and I had the feeling that it was more complex to handle than Mercurial (which I still think).

Dapr is an impressive set of APIs for building distributed applications with any language and platform. It provides a set of building blocks that you can use to build microservices. Dapr is based on sidecar architecture. Meaning that you need to run a Dapr sidecar for each of your applications. How do you debug your Dapr apps effectively? If you have been using PowerShell scripts to run and attach your debugger, you know how tedious and error-prone it can be. Ready to see how to use Rider or Visual Studio to debug your Dapr apps with ease and confidence?

Till now, we have seen two Dapr building blocks which are the service to service invocation building block and the secrets building block. The secret building block serves to protect things like a database connection string, an API key... so that they're never disclosed outside of the application. The service to service invocation building block serves to make calls between services in your distributed application easy. In this post, we will introduce a third one which is the bindings building block. The bindings building block enables your distributed application to handle external events or invoke external services.

In all previous posts, we were looking at the Dapr service invocation building block. We have seen how to expose and call HTTP and gRPC services using it. In this post, we will see how Dapr ease developers life when it comes to deal with secrets, thanks to the secrets management building block.

In previous posts, we focused on Dapr service invocation using the HTTP protocol. Dapr, through its service invocation, can also reliably and securely communicate with other applications using gRPC. We will have a look at this other capability in this post.

.NET Aspire 9.1 was just released on February 25th, 2025. It comes with great new dashboard features, and there is more! One feature I am particularly interested in is the ability to use Dev Containers.

In this post, I will show you how to use the new .NET Aspire 9.1 with a Dev Container and JetBrains Rider. You could also use Visual Studio Code.

My previous post showed how easy it is to develop a .NET C# MCP server and write a client able to communicate with it. Now, the question is how we can distribute our MCP server to be used by AI clients. In this post, we'll leverage the knowledge acquired from my previous posts to explore how to dockerize your .NET C# MCP server.

.NET Aspire 9.1 was just released on February 25th, 2025. It comes with great new dashboard features, and there is more! One feature I am particularly interested in is the ability to use Dev Containers.

In this post, I will show you how to use the new .NET Aspire 9.1 with a Dev Container and JetBrains Rider. You could also use Visual Studio Code.

My previous blog posts talks about built-in container support in the .NET SDK. It allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers. We saw how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry.

Today, I want to show you how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions. It brings us to the next level of automation.

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK that allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers.

For this blog post, I will explain how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry. It is possible to publish to different container registries, such as Docker Hub, GitHub, Azure Container Registry, or your own private registry. I will show you how to publish to GitHub Packages / Container Registry, but the process is similar for other registries.

This blog post will help you learn how to leverage the .NET SDK's built-in container support to effortlessly distribute and run your .NET applications in the cloud using Docker. Stay tuned!

In my development process I do use what Rob is describing in his post “Crazy Talk: Reducing ORM Friction” with some slight differences.

For example I developed Tech Head Brothers portal this way, as Innoveo Solutions web site. I use TDD and Domain Driven Development and I keep the mapping as one of the last step for my implementation.

Euss stand for Evaluant Universal Storage Services, it's a great open source (MIT License) Object-Relational mapping framework.

I use Euss on Tech Head Brothers portal since a long time now.

Microsoft just released Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC.

This time we get SketchFlow !

How do you host your video content created with Expression Encoder on Silverlight Streaming ?

The first answer is wait for the plugin that will let you do that:

If you are a lucky MSDN Universal subscriber then you can get Expression Encoder (released yesterday with Silverlight 1.0) for free. How ?

Juts use the key you have for Expression Studio delivered on MSDN Subscriber Downloads, on the page Subscription Product Keys.

I have made an animation using Microsoft Expression Blend 2 December Preview that I would like to export to a Video, anyone made that already? How?

I used Camtasia 5 to record the screen directly from Blend 2. The result is not bad but it miss some fluidity in the video of the animation!

Good timing for me :)

Expression Blend 2 September Preview is now available!

If you are a lucky MSDN Universal subscriber then you can get Expression Encoder (released yesterday with Silverlight 1.0) for free. How ?

Juts use the key you have for Expression Studio delivered on MSDN Subscriber Downloads, on the page Subscription Product Keys.

I found browsing the Internet an old software I developed Xit.

I am not 100% sure it was developed 10 years ago it might be more 11 years ago, but that's really funny to see things like that still on the Internet. Whoa, I didn't realized I was that old!!! :) Compared to my 102 grand father I will hopefully write software for quite some time :)

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://web20.designinterviews.com/badge.php?_web=40890ae62590fb25be72723e&_20=efeb29d16e49ae93ada4793e137672fc"></script>

Rédo started it and Richard was second.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

I am using Git for many, many years. I am a big fan of it. How could that be different when you had to use versioning systems like CVS, SVN... I even took influence so that the whole company I work for migrates to it.

Over the years, I have used different Git clients, tried to work only from my IDE without much liking it.

Even if online Github Pull Request is a nice and effective tool, in some situation you need to open your solution in Visual Studio to verify something.

One of the great new feature of TeamCity 9 is the possibility of Storing project settings in Git and Mercurial.

When you develop software it is primordial to be able to reproduce successfully builds. To achieve that goal you need for sure first to version the source code. But too often the build scripts are forgotten! Especially when the build scripts are created with such a great tool that is TeamCity.

Automating and optimizing the processes I use everyday to work is something important so that I get more productive and spend less time in things that a computer is better at.

My previous blog posts talks about built-in container support in the .NET SDK. It allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers. We saw how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry.

Today, I want to show you how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions. It brings us to the next level of automation.

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK that allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers.

For this blog post, I will explain how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry. It is possible to publish to different container registries, such as Docker Hub, GitHub, Azure Container Registry, or your own private registry. I will show you how to publish to GitHub Packages / Container Registry, but the process is similar for other registries.

This blog post will help you learn how to leverage the .NET SDK's built-in container support to effortlessly distribute and run your .NET applications in the cloud using Docker. Stay tuned!

As you might have guessed reading some of my older posts, I like to automate things which I believe a computer should do in place of humans.

Even if online Github Pull Request is a nice and effective tool, in some situation you need to open your solution in Visual Studio to verify something.

My previous blog posts talks about built-in container support in the .NET SDK. It allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers. We saw how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry.

Today, I want to show you how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions. It brings us to the next level of automation.

My previous blog posts talks about built-in container support in the .NET SDK. It allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers. We saw how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry.

Today, I want to show you how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions. It brings us to the next level of automation.

On February I posted about “Running your TeamCity builds from PowerShell for any Git branch” and now I have to configure a new ssh key so that TeamCity can connect to Gitlab.

I struggled a bit getting continuous error message from TeamCity that the connection failed because it was enable to load identity file. File rights were all ok on the key file and everything looked fine. But still the error message.

Hey Olivier, do you read my blog ? Here is the answer to your question, but this solution is not official

Link to Innovative Technology Weblog » How to relocate your Groove 2007 files to another disk

If you are like me and you are using Groove. I recommend you to read Marc Olson's Groove "12" Blog. Tomorrow Marc will blog about the integration of InfoPath and Groove 12, such an integration is so promising.

Groove Launchbar is great but sometimes it simply takes too much time to open it to get to a workspace.

1. Go with Explorer in your My Documents folder, Create a folder and call it My Groove

I updated my Windows 2003 server with the latest Groove Virtual Office version 3.1a (3.1.1.2364) and now it doesn't crash anymore at start time. I was told that this version supports Windows 2003 but I can't find anything online saying so.

Why having it on a Windows 2003 Server ?

I previously talked about “Running Github Hubot on a Windows machine”, “Using Github hubot and Appharbor service hook to get deployment status in Campfire/HipChat rooms” or even “Starting TeamCity builds from HipChat using Github Hubot”.

All those solution rely on an external chat service either Altassian HipChat or 37signals Campfire.

Appharbor provides a service hook which let’s you get informed when a build is finished sending both succeeded and failed builds.

We wanted to use this to get informed in our Campfire / HipChat room so that our distributed team can be informed about builds status without having to go to AppHarbor web site.

In the last posts, we looked at the code to build a HipChat Connect add-on with ASP.NET Core, run the solution in a Docker container and secure the access to the application with a valid HTTPS certificate that we got from Let's Encrypt for free and finally deploy all of this on Azure!

Following my previous posts on ASP.NET Core RC2, Docker and HipChat Connect add-on and Deploying Docker containers running ASP.NET Core RC2 to Microsoft Azure Cloud I needed, as promised in the last post, to come with a solution to secure the whole with an HTTPS certificate!

Following my previous post on ASP.NET Core RC2, Docker and HipChat Connect add-on I wanted to learn the next step which is to deploy my Docker container on the Microsoft Azure Cloud!

This weekend ASP.NET Core RC2 was starting to show up! And it finally was released today. Get it fresh from here. We had here a long three days weekend with quite awful gray clouds and cold weather for the season, so a perfect excuse to get started!

In late 2010 I reworked my home office and installed a new Ergotron LX Dual Side-by-Side Arm, to gain some place on my desk.

I got an email the other day from Didier, than a message on my facebook page from Antoine about an issue with my blog www.laurentkempe.com and my .NET portal www.techheadbrothers.com which were not redirecting correctly from laurentkempe.com and techheadbrothers.com to the ones with www in front.

So I fired up IIS manager and fixed this using the following easy way:

The other day I had to re-install my whole server which is hosting Tech Head Brothers. I had also to redo the configuration to have IIS deliver compressed content. I was quite sure to have a post on this but the only thing I could find was “Optimization of a Web Site - Using Content Expiration (IIS 6.0)”

So I started from scratch and after some issues I finally managed to have it running. I started uisng the following post from Scott Forsyth, “IIS Compression in IIS6.0” and I took over those steps from his post:

After publishing this for Starting ASP.NET Development Server from a right click in explorer it is time to do it for IIS Express.

Tonight trying out Orchard 1.1 I just wanted to start by right clicking and getting IIS Express fired so that I can test the 1.1 version.

Over the weekend I realized that my notebook became quite slow and was always reading something on the HD, even without any memory pressure. When I was to some music, starting an application was really corrupting the sound. So after some I realized that my Primary IDE controller went from DMA back to the old PIO mode. To solve this issue I reinstalled the the primary IDE port using the Device Manager, and after two reboots it went back to DMA and a acceptable speed.

You might find more information about that issue here: IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur.

I needed to create a virtual directory in IIS 6 during the deployment of one of our backend application on a Windows 2003 server. This application is a COM component written in C++ that I developed wrapping a very old VB6 COM component. The whole exposed as a Web Service using the SOAP Toolkit 3. I already discussed about it here.

So I created a script that will register both COM component, by the way regsvr32 is really bad cause it doesn't return different value if it fails. Right now I have no verification in the script that let me know if the registration went well. I plan to add it in a second step by reading the content of the registry using the reg command. The script is using the <em>SOAPVDIR.CMD</em> packaged with the SOAP Toolkit 3 to create the Virtual Directory with the soap ISAPI of the SOAP Toolkit 3:

After uninstalling V2i from Symantec I was asked to reboot my notebook. The reboot took for ever so I decide after 30 minutes to switch it off. Problems started when I rebooted, lots of drivers where missing and it seems that I lost the plug and play features. One of the first driver I decided to recover was the Sound driver. This is the way I recover from that sound driver issue.

• In services, check that WinAudio service is enabled, set to automatic, and running.
• In Device Manager, System Devices check that Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator is installed and running

If not, then you need to reinstall it:

• Copy machine.inf from %windir%\inf to your desktop
• Remove line ExcludeFromSelect=*
• Use Add new hardware wizard using the Have Disk option
• Select the machine.inf you saved on the desktop
• Install Plug and Play Software Device If the sound card is listed in the device manager, then uninstall it and start a scan for hardware changes. Afer installing it again I got the sound back live. I did the same for several other drivers that were missing on my notebook. And now it seems to be ok.

Now DNS are updated and I have Exchange 2003 working. I get a new email that I will have to share with my contacts. Thats will be lots of work. There is still something I need to fix: Outlook Web Access

I also installed Open Relay Filter Enterprise Edition from Vamsoft. Thanks to them for gracefully providing me a version.

This week I started the Coursera course Functional Programming Principles in Scala with Martin Odersky as instructor.

One of my first step was to have JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA working with the Scala programming language so that I can work on the course assignments using my preferred IDE.

Today I was listening and some time watching (it helps to have two monitors :) the following video that I got from JetBrains blog post, Vaclav Pech Talking at JAX 2010

I learned several tips and I think this video shows why I like more and more IntelliJ.

Day after day I find little gems in IntelliJ 9 that just make me more productive and give me more time to deal with the real interesting things.

Today for example I had to change a web.xml file which I was said that I should take care not to commit because if this file would go to our customer than we would have a problem.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

What are the options when you need to integrate Windows legacy code in a heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

The proposed problem was to expose a set of Windows C++ DLLs to a global SOA platform written in Java. Those DLLs would be then exposed as backend computation services.

This is an interessting video about the plugin eclipse4SL from Soyatec.

This plugin allows Eclipse / Java developers to build RIA with Silverlight and collaboration between Web Designers, .NET Developers and Java Developers.

What are the options when you need to integrate Windows legacy code in a heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

The proposed problem was to expose a set of Windows C++ DLLs to a global SOA platform written in Java. Those DLLs would be then exposed as backend computation services.

This week I started the Coursera course Functional Programming Principles in Scala with Martin Odersky as instructor.

One of my first step was to have JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA working with the Scala programming language so that I can work on the course assignments using my preferred IDE.

This post is a transcript of an internal post I did on Innoveo Solutions internal blog. Thanks to Innoveo to let me share this here!

Skye Editor is our metal model editor which is written in C# 4, WPF uses Model-View-ViewModel design pattern and MVVM Light.

Today I faced a nasty bug, a null pointer exception in a property databound to our WPF application. This had some nasty side effects, and for sure this part of the code didn’t had any unit test, too bad! For sure now it has.

The line of code was really simple

Today I was listening and some time watching (it helps to have two monitors :) the following video that I got from JetBrains blog post, Vaclav Pech Talking at JAX 2010

I learned several tips and I think this video shows why I like more and more IntelliJ.

Beginning of October we announced, through Mark’s blog, the update of the two open source projects we have at Jobping

• Jobping Url Shortener version 0.6

Yesterday evening I found a set of Google blog posts talking about web application acceptance testing which reflect Google experience through “Several years of experience across multiple project teams”.

This reflects a lot of points I brought into our discussions either at Innoveo or Jobping; best practices, screen/page object, dev. language, recording/coding, BDD..

At Jobping and Innoveo we are using TeamCity from JetBrains to automate our different builds.

Today I was asked by my colleague Roy the following interesting question “Can I rerun an old build?”

As said when we launched Jobping Open Source Short Urls Service, we at Jobping are committed to open source.

So last week we announced  StickyBeak, you might read more on the blog of Mark - Introduction to StickyBeak

The subject of this article is the String Calculator proposed by Roy Osherove. The Kata is done in C# uses Visual Studio 2012, JetBrains Resharper 7 and NCrunch.

But what is a TDD Kata? It is an implementation exercise starting with unit tests and leveraging refactoring that you practice daily for around 15 to 30 minutes.

Now that we've explored how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications, how to write your own Standard Input/Output (STDIO) MCP server in C# using the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk, and how we can dockerize your .NET C# MCP server to be able to distribute it for use by AI clients. It's time to take a step further and explore how to leverage Server-Sent Events (SSE) MCP servers so that we can deploy them remotely, for example on a Raspberry Pi.

My previous post showed how easy it is to develop a .NET C# MCP server and write a client able to communicate with it. Now, the question is how we can distribute our MCP server to be used by AI clients. In this post, we'll leverage the knowledge acquired from my previous posts to explore how to dockerize your .NET C# MCP server.

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, Ollama, and a nuget package called mcpdotnet to interact with an existing MCP Server. Since then, mcpdotnet has been elevated to become the "official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients, maintained by Microsoft".

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables seamless integration between AI systems and various data sources, allowing developers to create context-aware applications. In this post, we'll explore how to build a simple MCP server using C# and the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk library, which simplifies the process of creating and managing MCP servers.

In my previous post, we saw how to build the simplest Semantic Kernel local AI agent using Semantic Kernel and Ollama in C#. In this short post, we will see how simple it is to extend the capabilities of the Semantic Kernel local AI agent by adding function calling.

Joining Didier direction LeWeb’11 for the second time we are attending the biggest European Internet conference in Paris.

The topic this year is SOLOMO, Social-Local-Mobile.

I arrived this morning really early at the conference Le Web 3 '07 with Didier.

Today, my friend Didier finally pushed his post about Netflix on his blog, Corporate Culture: unusual Netflix example. Some time ago, quite some time ago, he sent me the presentation about Netflix, which had a big impact on me! I liked very much the idea !

Netflix thinks that “as they grow, they have to minimize rules”. Different approach as what we all know, experience, read. And … Netflix is definitely not a startup anymore! I would like to share with you a document from Netflix I found on SlideShare about their culture and some quite innovative management ideas they have put in place. Feed for thoughts ;-)

Today I faced the following challenge to solve: return all possible combinations of three source collections.

We are using C# and with Linq it was just so easy.

I have reached now another step on the new authoring tool for Tech Head Brothers portal by having some authors installing this new version and starting beta testing it. Has you can see, with the following twit, it seems that the tool is on the good way:

From Rédo (french blog)

Euss stand for Evaluant Universal Storage Services, it's a great open source (MIT License) Object-Relational mapping framework.

I use Euss on Tech Head Brothers portal since a long time now.

After running a first console app on my Raspberry Pi 3, I had to try ASP.NET Core and API. Two weeks ago when I posted ".NET Core console app running on Raspberry Pi", I could make API working, but I had no chance with MVC. Today it worked!

Now that there is a distribution of .NET Core on a Linux distro running on my Raspberry Pi 3, I had to try it.

In this post, I will explain all the steps I had to execute to be able to run my first Hello World application.

I am using a tool called logseq to manage my notes. It is a fantastic tool, and I would like to be able to extend it. I am not an expert web developer, but I am a .NET developer. I would like to be able to write plugins for logseq using .NET and C#. I have found a way to do it using WebAssembly. In this post, I am going to show you how to do it.

Today I was facing the following issue. I have an indexing system (read more here, here and here) using Lucene.Net that is working quite good. The drawback of the current implementation was that I couldn’t filter any to be indexed property decorated with the attribute. For example if I had a string property of my domain holding HTML, I wasn’t able to remove the HTML out of the string before indexing it.

I scratch my head some time, and finally came to a pragmatic solution.

Now that we've explored how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications, how to write your own Standard Input/Output (STDIO) MCP server in C# using the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk, and how we can dockerize your .NET C# MCP server to be able to distribute it for use by AI clients. It's time to take a step further and explore how to leverage Server-Sent Events (SSE) MCP servers so that we can deploy them remotely, for example on a Raspberry Pi.

My previous post showed how easy it is to develop a .NET C# MCP server and write a client able to communicate with it. Now, the question is how we can distribute our MCP server to be used by AI clients. In this post, we'll leverage the knowledge acquired from my previous posts to explore how to dockerize your .NET C# MCP server.

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, Ollama, and a nuget package called mcpdotnet to interact with an existing MCP Server. Since then, mcpdotnet has been elevated to become the "official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients, maintained by Microsoft".

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables seamless integration between AI systems and various data sources, allowing developers to create context-aware applications. In this post, we'll explore how to build a simple MCP server using C# and the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk library, which simplifies the process of creating and managing MCP servers.

In the previous post "Leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI for Tool Calling in C#", we explored how to create custom tools that enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrated how integrating these technologies enables developers to build applications with advanced AI capabilities, facilitating more complex interactions.

In this post, we'll take a step further and explore how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications. We'll continue using Ollama to run local AI models.

In September 2009 I posted about a tool I am using to build my MSBuild projects from the shell “Build your .NET project with a right click in Windows Explorer”

Last week I changed to MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad) which also add a context menu when you right click your project or solution files.

Tonight we got the following issue on our TeamCity build server which produce different ClickOnce setups :

c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3652, 9): error MSB3482: An error occurred while signing: Failed to sign ....\Tests\Output\bin\DeployClickOnce\app.publish\setup.exe.

Since some time I have the current scenario where I need to have conditional reference in a project. Basically the application must reference an assembly in one case in other it should reference another one. This was working correctly from an MSBuild point of view as the first implemented solution let me compile and run the application on my development machine and it was also working for our TeamCity build server. So everything was fine in this perfect word expect one thing!

The issue was the following; Visual Studio was showing two references of the ‘same assembly’ with different path. Not really an issue you would say because the correct one was used at compile time and at run time in all configurations. So the issue was that this had an impact of ReSharper. And this is I cannot accept because it affect my productivity.

The other day I published different posts about the way I automated our build process at Innoveo Solutions to generate different ClickOnce setup using TeamCity:

Build multiple ClickOnce deployment packages using MSBuild and Team City

I am in the train back home and wanted to try out quickly to migrate our WPF functional tests written has Unit Tests to BDD Specifications.

Here is the code I started from, pure Unit Test using NUnit and White

The other day I posted about “Automated functional tests using Watin and MSpec” which we do at Jobping as a spike to automate our functional tests on our ASP.NET MVC 2 site.

Yesterday evening I was facing an issue in my base class WebBaseSpec which led to really strange side effects. Basically when I was running one unit test alone it was Green, running all or more than one unit test will fail miserably with the well known STA issue of Watin.

Laurent Bugnion just published MVVM Light Toolkit V3 Alpha 3 which support WPF 4 and Silverlight 4!

I published, yesterday a short post in French on my Tech Head Brothers portal about Silverlight 4 Beta, Drop Target et MVVM which shows the usage of this new version of EventToCommand combined with Silverlight 4 Drop Target.

At Innoveo Solutions we are using .NET and WPF for our Innoveo Skye® Editor application. Skye® Editor is a distribution channel editor targeting business people letting them edit and configure their insurance products.

From the beginning we have adopted the Model-View-ViewModel architecture. Having our solution growing we were facing the issue of having our ViewModels dependency growing too. Some ViewModel became too much dependent of others. This was obvious in our unit tests whose complexity to setup were growing too. It was time to find a solution to decouple the ViewModels.

Today, my friend Didier finally pushed his post about Netflix on his blog, Corporate Culture: unusual Netflix example. Some time ago, quite some time ago, he sent me the presentation about Netflix, which had a big impact on me! I liked very much the idea !

Netflix thinks that “as they grow, they have to minimize rules”. Different approach as what we all know, experience, read. And … Netflix is definitely not a startup anymore! I would like to share with you a document from Netflix I found on SlideShare about their culture and some quite innovative management ideas they have put in place. Feed for thoughts ;-)

I am starting to use Mercurial for my personal projects. At the moment I use it only locally to be able to experience it but also to be able to try thing and revert easily to previous state.

To get started I downloaded

Soma just published some info about Microsoft “dogfooding” VS 2010 and .NET 4

There are some interesting statistics and explanation of what Soma think were critical factors to success.

In the last posts, we looked at the code to build a HipChat Connect add-on with ASP.NET Core, run the solution in a Docker container and secure the access to the application with a valid HTTPS certificate that we got from Let's Encrypt for free and finally deploy all of this on Azure!

Following my previous posts on ASP.NET Core RC2, Docker and HipChat Connect add-on and Deploying Docker containers running ASP.NET Core RC2 to Microsoft Azure Cloud I needed, as promised in the last post, to come with a solution to secure the whole with an HTTPS certificate!

Following my previous post on ASP.NET Core RC2, Docker and HipChat Connect add-on I wanted to learn the next step which is to deploy my Docker container on the Microsoft Azure Cloud!

Nice :-) !!! First I was MVP now I am also VIB.

Two weeks ago I got an email from Microsoft to invite me to the Mix in Paris. This email was starting with the following "[Invitation presse/VIB]", I had absolutely no clue what VIB was for, and as I was not someone from the press, I supposed I was a VIB. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the Mix 2007 in Paris.

Like last year I will attend Tech Ed Europe. This time in Barcelona, a wonderful city. I prefer it over Amsterdam. I will arrive on November 6th, mid of afternoon.

It will be the chance to meet some of you and especially Frédéric Colin, Grégory Renard, Aurelien Verla authors on Tech Head Brothers.

Microsoft France just published a page on which it lists all French Developer MVP.

A really nice idea!!!

I was renewed as Microsoft MVP in the category Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET. Great!!!

Congratulations to Michel Perfetti, that is now MVP Dev C#, and to all the other authors of Tech Head Brothers that get renewed:

The subject of this article is the String Calculator proposed by Roy Osherove. The Kata is done in C# uses Visual Studio 2012, JetBrains Resharper 7 and NCrunch.

But what is a TDD Kata? It is an implementation exercise starting with unit tests and leveraging refactoring that you practice daily for around 15 to 30 minutes.

For a long time I wanted to integrated NDepend on our build server so that this week I invested some time here and there to achieve that goal. I did that already a long time ago, I even wrote the documentation which you can read on NDepend website.

Patrick just announced on his blog the launch of the new NDepend v3. It is still in beta but very stable. I am testing it for a month now and enjoy very much it’s integration in Visual Studio 2008. I was using it and will continue to use it in our continuous integration server, TeamCity. But getting feedback right out of the developer environment is a very interesting feature.

Read more on Patrick’s blog post, “NDepend v3 is now 100% integrated in Visual Studio“

Euss stand for Evaluant Universal Storage Services, it's a great open source (MIT License) Object-Relational mapping framework.

I use Euss on Tech Head Brothers portal since a long time now.

In my effort to bring a good development environment for the next version of Tech Head Brothers portal, in which we should be (at the moment) three to develop, I went on with the integration of NDepend, the wonderful tool of Patrick Smacchia, with the just as well JetBrains Team City build management server.

As said in my last post I have defined three builds type

Early in my journey in developing software, I used to start a project by setting first a way to build my software automatically each time I did a set of changes. Long, very long ago, I used scripts scheduled to run. When JetBrains shipped TeamCity I started to use it extensively for my projects, here is my first post about "Set Up a Build Computer using VisualSVN, Team City, MsTest, NUnit" from March 21, 2008, but used it since version 1.0. Later on, I also used Azure Pipelines to build Git Diff Margin and also GitHub Actions, for example, to build and deploy those pages.

I am always loosing time searching for that information when we get an update of office templates, so I decided to make a ‘note to self’ so that I will not loose anymore time with that.

Start Word 2007 and go on Word Options, then click Advanced, File Locations:

To be able to install the latest version of the ATI Driver I have to use a tool to modify the normal installation package: Mobility DotNET Final1.1.1.0

For some time now I have to run the installation from the command prompt otherwise it crashes, and here is the command:

First do not trust their documentation! The launch anywhere (lax) file change doesn’t make it.

Do it by your own, with such a command:

I had to modify the Microsoft.WebDeployment.targets file to be able to compile through Team City the Web Deployment 2008 project !

<!-- Changed KEL ExePath="$(FrameworkSDKDir)bin" -->
<Target Name="AspNetMerge" 
        Condition="'$(UseMerge)' == 'true'"
        DependsOnTargets="$(MergeDependsOn)">
  <AspNetMerge
    ExePath="C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin"
    ApplicationPath="$(TempBuildDir)"
    KeyFile="$(_FullKeyFile)"
    DelaySign="$(DelaySign)"
    Prefix="$(AssemblyPrefixName)"
    SingleAssemblyName="$(SingleAssemblyName)"
    Debug="$(DebugSymbols)"
    Nologo="$(NoLogo)"
    ContentAssemblyName="$(ContentAssemblyName)"
    ErrorStack="$(ErrorStack)"
    RemoveCompiledFiles="$(DeleteAppCodeCompiledFiles)"
    CopyAttributes="$(CopyAssemblyAttributes)"
    AssemblyInfo="$(AssemblyInfoDll)"
    MergeXmlDocs="$(MergeXmlDocs)"
    ErrorLogFile="$(MergeErrorLogFile)"
  />
 
  <CreateItem Include="$(TempBuildDir)**\*.*">
    <Output ItemName="PrecompiledOutput" TaskParameter="Include" />
  </CreateItem>
  </Target>

In my development process I do use what Rob is describing in his post “Crazy Talk: Reducing ORM Friction” with some slight differences.

For example I developed Tech Head Brothers portal this way, as Innoveo Solutions web site. I use TDD and Domain Driven Development and I keep the mapping as one of the last step for my implementation.

Euss stand for Evaluant Universal Storage Services, it's a great open source (MIT License) Object-Relational mapping framework.

I use Euss on Tech Head Brothers portal since a long time now.

I am always loosing time searching for that information when we get an update of office templates, so I decided to make a ‘note to self’ so that I will not loose anymore time with that.

Start Word 2007 and go on Word Options, then click Advanced, File Locations:

Finally my video didn’t make it for the ShowOff contest at the PDC 2008. Here is the answer I’ve got:

I wanted to thank you again for your ShowOff entry. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming response to ShowOff, we had to make some hard decisions about which entries we would be able to show during the event. We really liked your video, but unfortunately it didn't make it into our final cut this year.

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, Ollama, and a nuget package called mcpdotnet to interact with an existing MCP Server. Since then, mcpdotnet has been elevated to become the "official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients, maintained by Microsoft".

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables seamless integration between AI systems and various data sources, allowing developers to create context-aware applications. In this post, we'll explore how to build a simple MCP server using C# and the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk library, which simplifies the process of creating and managing MCP servers.

In the previous post "Leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI for Tool Calling in C#", we explored how to create custom tools that enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrated how integrating these technologies enables developers to build applications with advanced AI capabilities, facilitating more complex interactions.

In this post, we'll take a step further and explore how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications. We'll continue using Ollama to run local AI models.

In my previous post, we saw how to build the simplest Semantic Kernel local AI agent using Semantic Kernel and Ollama in C#. In this short post, we will see how simple it is to extend the capabilities of the Semantic Kernel local AI agent by adding function calling.

The recent release of Microsoft's Semantic Kernel Agents Framework RC1 provides an excellent opportunity to explore its capabilities with C#. In this post, we'll walk through creating a simple agent using this framework and running it locally with Ollama.

Let's dive in!

Beginning of October we announced, through Mark’s blog, the update of the two open source projects we have at Jobping

• Jobping Url Shortener version 0.6

Finally my video didn’t make it for the ShowOff contest at the PDC 2008. Here is the answer I’ve got:

I wanted to thank you again for your ShowOff entry. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming response to ShowOff, we had to make some hard decisions about which entries we would be able to show during the event. We really liked your video, but unfortunately it didn't make it into our final cut this year.

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

I have reached now another step on the new authoring tool for Tech Head Brothers portal by having some authors installing this new version and starting beta testing it. Has you can see, with the following twit, it seems that the tool is on the good way:

From Rédo (french blog)

Finally my video didn’t make it for the ShowOff contest at the PDC 2008. Here is the answer I’ve got:

I wanted to thank you again for your ShowOff entry. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming response to ShowOff, we had to make some hard decisions about which entries we would be able to show during the event. We really liked your video, but unfortunately it didn't make it into our final cut this year.

We finally arrived in Los Angeles, Sébastien Ros and myself after quite a trip.

We left Mulhouse (East of France) at 7:AM on Saturday direction Paris, then Paris direction Seattle and finally Los Angeles.

I finished a first selection of my sessions!

This year I will finally attend the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) from October 27 to October 30 in Los Angeles.

Thanks to my son for the duck :-)

Great !!! Laurent you are not alone now. So what application do we build with it ?

I am using Git for many, many years. I am a big fan of it. How could that be different when you had to use versioning systems like CVS, SVN... I even took influence so that the whole company I work for migrates to it.

Over the years, I have used different Git clients, tried to work only from my IDE without much liking it.

Since Microsoft went to Windows as a service, so since Windows 10, I fully re-install my development machine, a Surface Book, with each main release of Windows.

As I hate to lose time, I searched a way to automate it, so that it is fast, repeatable and does the work, not me.

When I migrated our build to Cake (C# Make) we had one requirement which was to upload some of the build output's artifacts to DropBox at the end of the build.

The other day I wanted to send per email some code to a friend which doesn’t use Git. He is using Svn and I use Git Svn in front of this Svn repository. Why I do that? Don’t get me started…

So he couldn’t pull from my repo and we were kind of stuck. Really?!? For sure not, here was the goal I set as I am sure this will happen some other time: having the computer work for me. What a strange idea you would say! Yeah, the computer working for you. At the end aren’t we here to make the cool things and let the computer do the boring things?

I previously talked about “Running Github Hubot on a Windows machine”, “Using Github hubot and Appharbor service hook to get deployment status in Campfire/HipChat rooms” or even “Starting TeamCity builds from HipChat using Github Hubot”.

All those solution rely on an external chat service either Altassian HipChat or 37signals Campfire.

After writing about “Running your TeamCity builds from PowerShell for any Git branch” I’d like to talk about another integration which is using Github Hubot so that the build could be started directly form a chat room.

I love TeamCity and use it since a while to automate my build/release processes. As human we should never do the work a machine can do, we have certainly better and more interesting things to do.

Today I was listening and some time watching (it helps to have two monitors :) the following video that I got from JetBrains blog post, Vaclav Pech Talking at JAX 2010

I learned several tips and I think this video shows why I like more and more IntelliJ.

WebAssembly (WASM) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) are opening new opportunities for developers. .NET developers became familiar with WASM when Blazor WebAssembly was released. Blazor WebAssembly runs client-side in the browser on a WebAssembly-based .NET runtime. WASI is bringing WASM out of the browser world by providing a system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web. It is a standard for how WASM modules interact with the host environment. This post will show you how to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W using WASM and WASI.

After running a first console app on my Raspberry Pi 3, I had to try ASP.NET Core and API. Two weeks ago when I posted ".NET Core console app running on Raspberry Pi", I could make API working, but I had no chance with MVC. Today it worked!

Now that there is a distribution of .NET Core on a Linux distro running on my Raspberry Pi 3, I had to try it.

In this post, I will explain all the steps I had to execute to be able to run my first Hello World application.

With my team, we like to keep our C# code base updated. So, recently we went to .NET 7 and C# 11. At the same time, we were still adopting some of the new capabilities of .NET 6 and C# 10. Our code base is large, so it takes some time. One of the new features that we planned to use was the ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull method, which throws an exception if an argument is null. In this post, I will show you how I effortlessly did that refactoring by letting the machine work and not the human 😁 (me). In the past, I used the same approach to migrate lots of code that used Assert.True() to Assert.That(, Is.True) and for some other even more complex cases. We will use ReSharper and Rider for that.

The subject of this article is the String Calculator proposed by Roy Osherove. The Kata is done in C# uses Visual Studio 2012, JetBrains Resharper 7 and NCrunch.

But what is a TDD Kata? It is an implementation exercise starting with unit tests and leveraging refactoring that you practice daily for around 15 to 30 minutes.

Finishing this week sprint I decided to inspect some code using ReSharper 6.1 EAP and I started to give ReSharper a chance to help me find some of broken code.

When I started I had some of the following inspection results. It is clearly showing that some properties wasn’t identified as used in a WPF binding.

Today I faced a nasty bug, a null pointer exception in a property databound to our WPF application. This had some nasty side effects, and for sure this part of the code didn’t had any unit test, too bad! For sure now it has.

The line of code was really simple

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

.NET Aspire 9.1 was just released on February 25th, 2025. It comes with great new dashboard features, and there is more! One feature I am particularly interested in is the ability to use Dev Containers.

In this post, I will show you how to use the new .NET Aspire 9.1 with a Dev Container and JetBrains Rider. You could also use Visual Studio Code.

Dapr is an impressive set of APIs for building distributed applications with any language and platform. It provides a set of building blocks that you can use to build microservices. Dapr is based on sidecar architecture. Meaning that you need to run a Dapr sidecar for each of your applications. How do you debug your Dapr apps effectively? If you have been using PowerShell scripts to run and attach your debugger, you know how tedious and error-prone it can be. Ready to see how to use Rider or Visual Studio to debug your Dapr apps with ease and confidence?

With my team, we like to keep our C# code base updated. So, recently we went to .NET 7 and C# 11. At the same time, we were still adopting some of the new capabilities of .NET 6 and C# 10. Our code base is large, so it takes some time. One of the new features that we planned to use was the ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull method, which throws an exception if an argument is null. In this post, I will show you how I effortlessly did that refactoring by letting the machine work and not the human 😁 (me). In the past, I used the same approach to migrate lots of code that used Assert.True() to Assert.That(, Is.True) and for some other even more complex cases. We will use ReSharper and Rider for that.

Let' see in this blog post the new possibility offered by .NET Core 3.0 preview 2 to load and unload assemblies at run time using AssemblyLoadContext.

Now that we've explored how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications, how to write your own Standard Input/Output (STDIO) MCP server in C# using the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk, and how we can dockerize your .NET C# MCP server to be able to distribute it for use by AI clients. It's time to take a step further and explore how to leverage Server-Sent Events (SSE) MCP servers so that we can deploy them remotely, for example on a Raspberry Pi.

My previous post showed how easy it is to develop a .NET C# MCP server and write a client able to communicate with it. Now, the question is how we can distribute our MCP server to be used by AI clients. In this post, we'll leverage the knowledge acquired from my previous posts to explore how to dockerize your .NET C# MCP server.

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, Ollama, and a nuget package called mcpdotnet to interact with an existing MCP Server. Since then, mcpdotnet has been elevated to become the "official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients, maintained by Microsoft".

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables seamless integration between AI systems and various data sources, allowing developers to create context-aware applications. In this post, we'll explore how to build a simple MCP server using C# and the modelcontextprotocol / csharp-sdk library, which simplifies the process of creating and managing MCP servers.

In the previous post "Leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI for Tool Calling in C#", we explored how to create custom tools that enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrated how integrating these technologies enables developers to build applications with advanced AI capabilities, facilitating more complex interactions.

In this post, we'll take a step further and explore how to leverage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to utilize external Tools and AI models in C# applications. We'll continue using Ollama to run local AI models.

What are the options when you need to integrate Windows legacy code in a heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

The proposed problem was to expose a set of Windows C++ DLLs to a global SOA platform written in Java. Those DLLs would be then exposed as backend computation services.

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

I started to migrate the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool and portal from Web Service Enhancement 3 (WSE 3) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This is a next step in the integration of .NET Framework 3 in Tech Head Brothers portal.

Till today I was using WSE 3 from the Word VSTO solution to securely publish content to the portal directly out of Word 2003/2007.

What are the options when you need to integrate Windows legacy code in a heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

The proposed problem was to expose a set of Windows C++ DLLs to a global SOA platform written in Java. Those DLLs would be then exposed as backend computation services.

From Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (tips from the SQL Azure — Getting Started forum, this post) :

Please be aware that SSMS is not supported with SQL Azure yet. However, you can use the following workaround for the time being:

From: http://www.mssqlcity.com/FAQ/Admin/DBOwner.htm

Answer:

This week I started the Coursera course Functional Programming Principles in Scala with Martin Odersky as instructor.

One of my first step was to have JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA working with the Scala programming language so that I can work on the course assignments using my preferred IDE.

As you might have read on Didier’s blog or even on Innoveo’s blog I passed the ScrumMaster’s certification end of last year. Yeah I know I am late to post this ;-)

I must say that the course held by Jimi Fosdick was interesting and brought me some new idea.

Today at Innoveo Solutions we had our daily Stand Up meeting using Skype as I am at home. It worked really good ! I can’t wait to experience it on the new plasma TV that we have in our meeting room!

I just registered online to PDC2008 and will attend the following Pre-Conference session:

Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft

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The other day I was searching for a small project to get started with Silverlight 2 development.

In my previous post, we saw how to build the simplest Semantic Kernel local AI agent using Semantic Kernel and Ollama in C#. In this short post, we will see how simple it is to extend the capabilities of the Semantic Kernel local AI agent by adding function calling.

The recent release of Microsoft's Semantic Kernel Agents Framework RC1 provides an excellent opportunity to explore its capabilities with C#. In this post, we'll walk through creating a simple agent using this framework and running it locally with Ollama.

Let's dive in!

Microsoft recently unveiled Phi-3, the latest iteration of their Small Language Model (SLM). And hot on its heels is Ollama, a powerful tool that enables you to run SLMs and LLMs right on your own machine.

Excited to dive in? In this guide, I'll show you how to harness the power of Phi-3 and Ollama using C# and Semantic Kernel. I'll walk you through the process of creating a simple console application to get you started on your SLM journey.

So, let's get coding and unlock the potential of Phi-3 and Ollama on your machine!

This afternoon I was working on Innoveo Skye Editor which is a WPF application written in C#.

The application is using Telerik RadControls for WPF.

Finishing this week sprint I decided to inspect some code using ReSharper 6.1 EAP and I started to give ReSharper a chance to help me find some of broken code.

When I started I had some of the following inspection results. It is clearly showing that some properties wasn’t identified as used in a WPF binding.

The other day I disabled Silverlight add-on in IE9. Don’t ask me why I don’t really remember, and I prefer not.

Several days after that I started an out of the browser application, ClickTime which we use to report our hours. And I got a weird JavaScript error a la IE with a white window and the picture asking me to install Silverlight. I checked that it was still installed and it was, no problem.

Laurent Bugnion just published MVVM Light Toolkit V3 Alpha 3 which support WPF 4 and Silverlight 4!

I published, yesterday a short post in French on my Tech Head Brothers portal about Silverlight 4 Beta, Drop Target et MVVM which shows the usage of this new version of EventToCommand combined with Silverlight 4 Drop Target.

Follow up on the post from Laurent “Expression Encoder 2 publish to Silverlight Streaming plugin”.

My way to upload is to use WebDav by mapping a network drive using my Silverlight Streaming Account ID as the user name and my Account Key as the password. You will find those information on the Administration Home page of Silverlight Streaming.

First if you are using Silverlight 2 Beta 1, you will be able to upload your video with pause and resume. Second they finally deliver a HTTP endpoint for videos hosted in Silverlight Streaming.

We will make with Mathieu a great use of those two features soon :-)

First of all it goes from 4Gb to 10Gb, whouah!

Get your free 10 GB hosting space now!

Tonight I reached a new milestone on my current development for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

You might know, or guessed, from one of my last post; "Tech Head Brothers Silverlight Streaming framework" that I am working on adding Silverlight Streaming to Tech Head Brothers. I first released a little framework to ease the development against the REST API of Silverlight Streaming. Now I went further on with a first vertical slice of the whole solution.

Automating and optimizing the processes I use everyday to work is something important so that I get more productive and spend less time in things that a computer is better at.

In my humble opinion it is definitely not a good idea! Why?

1. It is brittle test because it depends to the CPU load of the machine running the test. Maybe it runs fine on your development machine, and will for sure from time to time fail on your build server because of the load on the server.

The subject of this article is the String Calculator proposed by Roy Osherove. The Kata is done in C# uses Visual Studio 2012, JetBrains Resharper 7 and NCrunch.

But what is a TDD Kata? It is an implementation exercise starting with unit tests and leveraging refactoring that you practice daily for around 15 to 30 minutes.

For some time now I slightly modified my development workflow and I have seen a great improvement in my developers life:

• it started by using Git Svn in front of our central Svn

I like the Roy Osherove blog: Five Whys, Leadership in software teams.

Follow up on those two posts “How to measure programmer productivity using TDD Katas” or “Be Productive and Go Mouseless”. I would like to share a little keyboard shortcut which save me quite some time on my daily developments.

Migrating our TeamCity server today I got the following error on the new server:

error MSB3147: Could not find required file 'setup.bin' in …

First you need to un-install the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK from the build server! Then you can download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 and extract it on the server, there you will find the file silverlight_sdk.msi, that will allow you to install Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 SDK.

Now if you followed my post MSBuild and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 running in Team City, then you know about the issue:

After one comment of Chris Walquist on one of my last post about Team City integration of NCover here is the way I run NCover through MSBuild in Team City.

First I need to import the Task of NCover.

In my effort to bring a good development environment for the next version of Tech Head Brothers portal, in which we should be (at the moment) three to develop, I went on with the integration of NDepend, the wonderful tool of Patrick Smacchia, with the just as well JetBrains Team City build management server.

As said in my last post I have defined three builds type

Michel Perfetti just released Fissum 0.5 a tool that will simplify the life of all developers using Team System:

"Fissum is a TFS Client. Fissum provides a direct access to your work items without opening the team explorer. Click here to see some Screenshots."

Michel Perfetti just released Fissum 0.4 with source code on Codeplex.

Fissum is a TFS Client it provides a direct access to your work items without opening the team explorer

Tonight I had the following issue; right clicking on a Team Query in Team Explorer and choosing 'Open in Microsoft Excel' gave the following error:

interface not registered 0x80040155

I just made my first checkins on CodePlex for the project Tech Head Brothers Authoring.

CodePlex is REALLY COOL, having an access to a Team Server from Visual Studio 2005 is just great. I like it very much.

One of the great new feature of TeamCity 9 is the possibility of Storing project settings in Git and Mercurial.

When you develop software it is primordial to be able to reproduce successfully builds. To achieve that goal you need for sure first to version the source code. But too often the build scripts are forgotten! Especially when the build scripts are created with such a great tool that is TeamCity.

For a long time I wanted to integrated NDepend on our build server so that this week I invested some time here and there to achieve that goal. I did that already a long time ago, I even wrote the documentation which you can read on NDepend website.

Automating and optimizing the processes I use everyday to work is something important so that I get more productive and spend less time in things that a computer is better at.

On February I posted about “Running your TeamCity builds from PowerShell for any Git branch” and now I have to configure a new ssh key so that TeamCity can connect to Gitlab.

I struggled a bit getting continuous error message from TeamCity that the connection failed because it was enable to load identity file. File rights were all ok on the key file and everything looked fine. But still the error message.

As you might now from reading my blog I tend to automate as much as I can.

Why? Because I hate to do repetitive tasks. First because it is boring, at least for me, and as a developer we have more interesting things to do. Second because executing repetitive tasks tend to be error prone.

Thanks to Didier, now Tech Head Brothers, my french .NET portal is also known in the French West Indies island of St.Barth.

TechHeadBrothers and Innoveo are now well represented in Saint Barth ;-)

Finally my video didn’t make it for the ShowOff contest at the PDC 2008. Here is the answer I’ve got:

I wanted to thank you again for your ShowOff entry. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming response to ShowOff, we had to make some hard decisions about which entries we would be able to show during the event. We really liked your video, but unfortunately it didn't make it into our final cut this year.

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

I am happy to announce that I finally released today my first Visual Studio 2012 extension called Git Diff Margin.

Git Diff Margin

There are some times in which you need to come to some extreme solutions. Having two days of trials without success to have a portlet running in a local Tomcat with Day portal I came to the following solution.

Shortly why I came to such a solution? I needed to work on some CSS on a portal solution, and the development cycle was taking too long. I had to commit to svn, run a teamcity build which deployed a war to weblogic to finally be able to test my CSS changes. Far too long.

If you are a user of the fantastic DropBox tool you might know that you have to organize your folders under a top root folder. This was really an issue for me which I wanted to solve because I like to organize my files in a different manner.

I used the mklink command from a Windows Command

In September 2009 I posted about a tool I am using to build my MSBuild projects from the shell “Build your .NET project with a right click in Windows Explorer”

Last week I changed to MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad) which also add a context menu when you right click your project or solution files.

End of summer 2022, the .NET team at Microsoft announced two things related to containers: .NET in Chiseled Ubuntu containers and then a week after built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK. I have talked about both topics on two episodes of the French podcast devdevdev.net by my friend Richard Clark. In this post, I will explain what those are and how to combine them.

In the past, within my team at Innoveo, we had several discussions about the best way to unit test async WPF ICommand. We value quality, so testing is essential to us. We decided to make the methods called by the command internal so that our tests could call those.

What is the problem with unit testing an Async WPF ICommand? The problem is that the command is an async void method! So, you have no way to await the end of the execution of your command. So, your test might assert on things that are still executing.

I am in the train back home and wanted to try out quickly to migrate our WPF functional tests written has Unit Tests to BDD Specifications.

Here is the code I started from, pure Unit Test using NUnit and White

When you build automated WPF functional test using White in which you need to open a file through a Windows open file dialog, you will be confronted with the following issue. Windows open file dialog remember the last path with which you opened a file.

So you might have some unit tests that are green for a while which starts to be red for no apparent reasons.

I’d like to introduce a tool that I have added for a month or two in my toolset. This tool is White from ThoughtWorks. Here is the description of White:

White: Automate windows applications

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

I have reached now another step on the new authoring tool for Tech Head Brothers portal by having some authors installing this new version and starting beta testing it. Has you can see, with the following twit, it seems that the tool is on the good way:

From Rédo (french blog)

For three night now I focused on one scenario for the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool:

• As an author I want to be able to copy source code from Visual Studio and insert it into the authored Word document

If you are an old (even not so old) video game player, do you remember those old days of fun with pac man, space invaders, frogger… You have to watch this fantastic video!

New York invasion by 8-bits creatures !

Since the last update two-three days ago of my notebook ATI video drivers I had only crashes! Finally thanks to the Vista Roll Back Driver I was able to go back to the previous version and I don't have anymore crashes when I go in sleep mode.

If you have installed SP1 of Vista you certainly recognized that your drive lost around 1Gb of free space.

The solution is to use a tool that comes with the SP1 to recover your free space at the price of not being able to come back and uninstall the SP1.

After some cleanup on my C: drive to get back to the 7Gb minimum free space needed, an update to the latest drivers of ATI and finally a backup with Acronis True Image Workstation, I was ready to install the Windows Vista SP1.

As you can see on this page and on this picture:

Dapr is an impressive set of APIs for building distributed applications with any language and platform. It provides a set of building blocks that you can use to build microservices. Dapr is based on sidecar architecture. Meaning that you need to run a Dapr sidecar for each of your applications. How do you debug your Dapr apps effectively? If you have been using PowerShell scripts to run and attach your debugger, you know how tedious and error-prone it can be. Ready to see how to use Rider or Visual Studio to debug your Dapr apps with ease and confidence?

As you might have guessed reading some of my older posts, I like to automate things which I believe a computer should do in place of humans.

I have been playing with all Docker tools for quite some time now! Started with the command line and all its commands like docker start, stop, ps, etc... Then I tried Kitematic and even compiled it from the source before it was supporting Windows! Then Docker Toolbox.

Even if online Github Pull Request is a nice and effective tool, in some situation you need to open your solution in Visual Studio to verify something.

I am just back from 2.5 months unpaid leave which I used to spend time with my family. So, I almost did not spend time with software development. One exception is that I wanted to be able to configure Visual Studio 2017 to be able to debug into ASP.NET Core 2.0 source code.

Whenever you have to relocate your svn working copy because the svn server url or protocol as changed, you need to use TortoiseSvn relocate. If, like me, you use VisualSvn plugin then you would need to quit Visual Studio and come back to Windows Explorer and TortoiseSvn, right click your project folder then find Relocate command:

I am using and enjoying for some time now VisualSVN plugin in Visual Studio 2008. I just discovered a nice feature that is not part of the normal menu but that you can easily add to; the pending changes window:

On October 24th, Docker announced the support of WASM and WASI in a new technical preview release. I wanted to try it out and see how it works with .NET 7. If you want to know more about WASM and WASI you can read the introduction from my previous post, "Using WASM and WASI to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W".

WebAssembly (WASM) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) are opening new opportunities for developers. .NET developers became familiar with WASM when Blazor WebAssembly was released. Blazor WebAssembly runs client-side in the browser on a WebAssembly-based .NET runtime. WASI is bringing WASM out of the browser world by providing a system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web. It is a standard for how WASM modules interact with the host environment. This post will show you how to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W using WASM and WASI.

On October 24th, Docker announced the support of WASM and WASI in a new technical preview release. I wanted to try it out and see how it works with .NET 7. If you want to know more about WASM and WASI you can read the introduction from my previous post, "Using WASM and WASI to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W".

WebAssembly (WASM) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) are opening new opportunities for developers. .NET developers became familiar with WASM when Blazor WebAssembly was released. Blazor WebAssembly runs client-side in the browser on a WebAssembly-based .NET runtime. WASI is bringing WASM out of the browser world by providing a system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web. It is a standard for how WASM modules interact with the host environment. This post will show you how to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W using WASM and WASI.

I am using a tool called logseq to manage my notes. It is a fantastic tool, and I would like to be able to extend it. I am not an expert web developer, but I am a .NET developer. I would like to be able to write plugins for logseq using .NET and C#. I have found a way to do it using WebAssembly. In this post, I am going to show you how to do it.

The other day I faced a strange issue when I wanted to add a service reference to the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool. The code generated wasn’t compiling with errors located in the file Reference.cs.

Drilling down the issue I figured out that the default namespace, TechHeadBrothers.Word, was the issue. It was just added at some place and at other not.

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

For three night now I focused on one scenario for the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool:

• As an author I want to be able to copy source code from Visual Studio and insert it into the authored Word document

In the past, within my team at Innoveo, we had several discussions about the best way to unit test async WPF ICommand. We value quality, so testing is essential to us. We decided to make the methods called by the command internal so that our tests could call those.

What is the problem with unit testing an Async WPF ICommand? The problem is that the command is an async void method! So, you have no way to await the end of the execution of your command. So, your test might assert on things that are still executing.

I like very much the idea of a .NET Generic Host in the MSDN documentation:

An object that encapsulates an app's resources, such as:

• Dependency injection (DI)
• Logging
• Configuration
• IHostedService implementations

At work, we are planning to migrate our WPF application from .NET Framework 4.7 to .NET Core 3.0. The main reason for doing so is that it was always a big pain to organize the updates of the .NET Framework on our customer machines. So being able to bundle .NET Core with our application is a big plus for us. Then, for sure, we are looking for the performance improvements brought by .NET Core and finally the new capabilities brought by the fast pace of innovation of .NET Core.

This afternoon I was working on Innoveo Skye Editor which is a WPF application written in C#.

The application is using Telerik RadControls for WPF.

The other day I posted about “Automated functional tests using Watin and MSpec” which we do at Jobping as a spike to automate our functional tests on our ASP.NET MVC 2 site.

Yesterday evening I was facing an issue in my base class WebBaseSpec which led to really strange side effects. Basically when I was running one unit test alone it was Green, running all or more than one unit test will fail miserably with the well known STA issue of Watin.

I blogged yesterday about “BDD web application testing using easyB and Sahi”

I was asked to provide a sample, so here it is!

I already talked about the way we are testing our web application at Jobping in the following posts “ASP.NET MVC 2, MSpec and Watin ” and ”Automated functional tests using Watin and MSpec”.

The other day I landed on the DZone page “Automated Browser Testing: What's in Your Toolkit?” In the list of around 10 tools I knew some of them but there were 3 I didn’t knew. So I decided to go on and read about those 3. In this list there were Sahi which got me with those three sentences: