Steve Fenton is a three-time Microsoft MVP for developer technologies. He’s a Software Punk, an author, a programming-architect, a pragmatist/abstractionist, and a generalising-generalist. His day job spans the worlds of Product Management, Data and Analytics, Support, and Software Development. These are brought together in the DITE Cycle. Like many of you, he’s too busy to remember all of this stuff, so he writes it all down here.
Books by Steve Fenton
A Note From Steve
The primary audience for the writing found herein is me. It’s super-easy to forget stuff if you don’t write it down, as I did the second time I had to fix a really tricky certificate problem in .NET. If only I had written down the answer, I could have saved hours of irritating replays of all the same steps I had used to find the problem in the first instance. My goal in life is to start a punk revolution in software development. I am also secretly S. M. Fenton the author of The Vanishing Room.
Recent Thoughts
You can review my full archive of thoughts, but the most recent entries are listed below.
Notifications for Web Apps Posted in: Programming - Although it has been abused with an enthusiasm that borders on the insane, there are good reasons to use the Notifications API in your web apps. For example, you write a mail client that allows the user to request notifications for key contacts… if they are browsing your web-based app, they should get notifications. To […] IISExpress.exe Exited With Access Violation Posted in: Programming - I was happily typing away at some ASP.NET Core controllers and views, calling a view component to render out some paging links, when this happened… The program iisexpress.exe’ has exited with code -1073741819 (0xc0000005) ‘Access violation’. No exception visible in Visual Studio. No indication of where the error was. Nothing. The Internet supplied links to […] Reduce Costs by 12x on Azure Posted in: Azure - I’m in the process of writing a little test app that I’d like to run on Azure to keep an eye on a suite of 1,000 websites. It’s a .NET Core app that replaces a test pack written with JMeter that has been manually “push-button” executed in the past. It means the tests can run […] Little Scripts: Checking Web Page Images Posted in: Automation - This is a note-to-future-self as I just threw together a little script to test images on a web page. Specifically, it highlights: Images that are not lazy loaded Images that are much bigger than their display size As images sizes aren’t reliable until the image is displayed, you will need to run it if your […] Start and Stop an Azure App Service on a Schedule with Azure Logic Apps Posted in: Azure - Although starting and stopping a web app doesn’t in itself save you a great deal of cash, in situations where you have Web Jobs running and a serverless database, you can effectively run a “business hours” app at a lower cost if you stop it outside of business hours. Start an App Service Each Week […] Software Development Process Does Not Matter Posted in: Process - Process interests me. Refining and improving a process to make work more joyful and productive matters to me. But, what has become clear over the past thirty years is that in software development, process just doesn’t matter. Seriously. It doesn’t. It might just be because I’m becoming a software punk revolutionary, but I suspect not. […] The Software Punk Revolution Posted in: Programming - Let’s be honest. Our planet is churning out supercodemonsters at an alarming rate. These pinnacles of virtuosity are idols to the false gods of development ego. The pattern has always been there, but in the past it was misdirected enthusiasm. On day one you’d learn how to extend prototypes in JavaScript. On day two, everything […] Should I Migrate to Hey for Email? Posted in: Opinion - Having signed up the wait list for Hey, I received my invite and subsequently undertook a two-week trial. What happened next has changed how I interact with email forever. Although I may be repeating information that is already out there, I’m going to focus on a small number of features that let you change your […] #SleepBedless Nominations Posted in: Other - This month (June 2020), Depaul UK launched the #SleepBedless campaign. They asked members of the public to sleep without beds for a night to raise awareness of hidden homelessness and to help fundraise to help them with their coronavirus crisis costs. More than half of young people in hidden homelessness have suffered harm and Depaul […] The Lockdown Effect Posted in: Opinion - As some countries around the world lift restrictions following COVID-19 lockdowns, we can start to see the effects the lockdown will have on different companies and industries. From the data I have seen so far, the lockdown effect seems to divide organisations into three broad categories: winners, losers, and recoverees. Let’s look at what this […] 
