Renewing SSL certificates for applications we deploy with Octopus Deploy is a straightforward task. We can go to the certificate store, replace the old certificate with the new one and the next time we deploy the certificate is on the server. If we need to update the certificate for Octopus Deploy...

   Packages get outdated in no time. Keeping your dependencies up to date is not only a good thing, but because of the many security issues also an important task. It is already a few years since I wrote about the little .NET helper libyear. While this tool is still under active development and does...

   With the end of the year just around the corner, it is time to look back and take a brief look ahead to 2026.

   There are a whole bunch of non-printable characters in ASCII like tabulator, end of medium or shift in that sometimes finds its way into a user input. This often happens when copy and pasting data from Microsoft Office. We can find most of those special characters by copying the data from SQL...

   By default, ASP.NET validates the dependency injection container configuration at runtime. As a result, we only discover missing or misconfigured dependencies when the application runs. While this approach works, getting feedback at the build time would be a time saver.

   As we moved from .Net Full Framework to .NET 6, we had to use the little hack of creating a AssemblyInfo.cs file and put this content into it to access the internal classes and methods from our test project: csharp using System.Runtime.CompilerServices; [assembly:InternalsVisibleTo( Logic.Tests )]

   With Windows 11 came a new context menu in the file explorer. What before was a one click action, now takes us two steps: We right-click on the file to open the first context menu: Now we need to click on Show more options to get the Windows 10 context menu: So far, I accepted this extra step as...

   In C# we have two ways to initialise a dictionary. While both give us a dictionary in the end, there is a small but important difference when it comes to duplicated values. Let us explore the difference.

   GUIDs are great for generating unique identifiers across distributed systems, since they need no centralised coordination and are globally unique. But their randomness comes with a price tag when we use them in relational databases: fragmented indexes, slower inserts, and no sense of order. Since ...

   When we want to make sure that our method only accepts values that are not null, we can write guard clauses like these on top of the method: csharp string Combine(string address, string city, string zipCode) if(address null) throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(address)); if(String.IsNullOrEmpty...

   A few months back I reviewed an application. It was sad to see in how little time you could create a mess that is not only hard to work with, but that can only be changed with a lot of effort. In this post we focus on one tiny little detail that can help you as a warning sign early on: having test...

   When we run Linux on a Docker container, we may not know what terminal application or shell currently runs. If we want to find out, we can run two commands to get an answer.

   When we want to connect from the host system to an API inside a Docker container, we can map the port with the -p option and then access it through localhost. So far, so good. But what do we need to do if we want to make the connection in the reverse direction?

   As I moved to a larger SSD, I had a problem: How can I move the systems partition of Windows at the end of the SSD so that I can use the free space to extend my existing C: drive on Windows?

   In Windows, we sometimes run into files or folders we can not access, even with elevated privileges. The takeown tool helps us solve this problem by letting us take ownership of those files or directories. Once we own them, we can adjust permissions or grant access as needed. The basic command...

   If you search for a value with an in the name, you learn something new about SQL Server, but end up with a result that does not match your expectation: sql SELECT FROM [dbo].[DatabaseLog] WHERE Object LIKE ’% %’ If we run this query, we do not get back everything with an in it. Instead, we get back...

   If you have two repositories with the same name in GitHub Desktop, you have a hard time to figure out which one is which: This can happen when we need to work on a fork of the project and the original one at the same time or when we have a backup in a different folder where we need to check...

   There is an interesting pattern that you can find in many projects, that usually starts with a good idea and turns into a dump in no time: the core folder. You start with an application and think about the core business, the important stuff. So, you go on and create a core folder. Here is now the...

   There is an annoying bug in the Windows 11 Installer that catches me way too often. If you select something different than the pre-selected values in the first screen for the language options, the installer starts but then stays forever at this progress level: 42%

   Many developers use GitHub to share their code. It is convenient, offers a lot of features and works without any noticeable problems for years. Did you ever thought on creating a backup for your repositories? Git helps us to ignore that task a bit. With every git clone we create a full copy of the...