The majority of the libraries developers use in their projects these days are open source. So in case something crashes inside third party library or you just want to know how it works, it is possible to get the PDB files from Microsoft Symbols Servers and debug it. If for some reasons PDB cannot be found on the servers, you can always grab the source code from GitHub and add to your project manually. Unfortunately when you use commercial libraries, it is impossible to do any of the previous steps. Luckily with Resharper you are able to generate PDB files from assembly and use it later in Visual Studio to debug it. Let’s assume we would like to generate PDB files for EntityFramework. First of all, we have to locate EntityFramework assembly in Assembly Explorer. Go to Solution Explorer, RMB click on assembly you are interested in and select View in Assembly Explorer.

We’ve been using Cake in our project for quite some time and it has been working great. However for time to time lack of debugging support was really annoying for me. Fortunately it seems that these times are gone now. During NDC Oslo 2016 Gary Ewan Park showed that it is possible to attach debugger to the build process. Here are the steps to achieve that.

Everyone who has ever had to analyze logs from production environment knows, that quite often it is not an easy task. Usually application flow is deduced by log entries matched by thread id, which is problematic when you deal with multithreading scenarios. Say for example we have following piece of code

I’ve been using Console2 for quite some time and as for now it is my favorite command line terminal. The one thing I like the most is availability to use multiple tabs you can easily switch between. By default Console2 starts with only one tab opened, which was a bit of a pain for me. Mainly because I work a lot with Git and I also like to have a Visual Studio command prompt opened. So basically every time I launched command line I had to open one or two additional tabs. Fortunately it is quite easy to launch multiple tabs on startup. All you have to do is to create a shortcut to the Console2 with proper flags. Say for example I have following tabs defined

I’m a part of a team which creates large enterprise platform for the banking sector. Due to the fact that we operate in the financial area, our application consumes a high amount of downstream services. One of the major problems we are facing at the moment is the inaccessibility of those services on DEV and UAT environments. It often happens that one of those services is down for quite some time, so our development speed is impaired. The bigger problem, however, is the fact that our end-to-end tests are red. Having a red test on TeamCity for a long time is a really annoying thing because basically at this point, we just automatically assume that all of the failures are caused by issues with downstream systems. Fortunately, we finally decided to get rid of this problem and this is the solution we came up with.

Even though in my current project we use .NET 4.5 we still have lots of references to internal libraries targeting .NET 4.0. Usually it is not a problem, however some of these libraries follow Asynchronous Programming Model pattern. This approach makes the code quite ugly because we end up with lots of nested callbacks.

Recently I’ve been doing some small refactoring of my pet project. Nothing too fancy - just namespace adjustment, variables and class renaming etc. However it turned out that even these minor changes can in fact be major ones. All of the sudden most of my integration tests started failing due to SQLException.

Most of .NET developers are familiar with collection initializers syntax. Long story short, this language feature allows you to replace this ugly syntax