When you accept a view model in your .NET Core MVC application, you can request that only certain fields are bound, like this [Bind(“Title”)]. Neat. But when you want to apply the changes to your domain object, you often want to do a similar thing and only update certain fields (and only if they reallyContinue reading “Simple Conditional Updates to Entities in ASP.NET Core MVC”
Author Archives: Steve Fenton
The Fly on the Windshield
Every organisation has to deal with this problem. It has been described in many different ways, including the famous quaductionism of “Urgent vs Important” to the simplicity of phrases like “firefighting”. Yes, it’s all those tasks that people seem to want now, which are stopping you from doing the real work. My analogy for thisContinue reading “The Fly on the Windshield”
Switch Off Rich Link Pasting in Edge
There is a cool new feature in Microsoft Edge that pastes links with rich formatting. If you copy a link from the page or from the address bar, it will paste in a rich format, so instead of seeing https://www.example.com/ you’ll see Example Website (example.com) and it will already be linked to your selected destination.Continue reading “Switch Off Rich Link Pasting in Edge”
What Data is Missing?
When you start collecting data at scale, you need to decide when to invest in keeping “all the datas” and when to keep only a sample. When it comes to sampling, you need to ensure that the parts you discard and the parts that you keep are a truly representative sample. That means you needContinue reading “What Data is Missing?”
Working With Public Coronavirus Data
The UK Government provides public datasets that can be used by the media or the public. One such dataset contains information collected for the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on people living and working in the UK. The problem with this dataset, though, is that we weren’t able to record the data until after theContinue reading “Working With Public Coronavirus Data”
Remove Blank Lines From a File with PowerShell
When importing a file full of data into a test system, I discovered that the CSV library I was using to do all the work was stopping when it reached a blank line. That makes sense, it thinks the data has ended. On inspection, I found quite a lot of blank lines, so there wasContinue reading “Remove Blank Lines From a File with PowerShell”
The Dunning-Kruger Snap
This is a short post, which assumes you are already familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Simply put, the Dunning-Kruger Snap is a double realisation; part direct and part meta. The first part of the realisation is driven by tipping your knowledge past a precipice that triggers an epiphany of how little you know. It’s whenContinue reading “The Dunning-Kruger Snap”
Make Azure Virtual Machine Disks Smaller
Making a disk larger on Azure is a simple process in the Azure portal. You just stop the machine, edit the disk, enter a new size and hit “Save”. When you try to make a disk smaller, though, you’ll be told “new disk size should be greater than 1024 GiB. Disks can only be resizedContinue reading “Make Azure Virtual Machine Disks Smaller”
Use PowerShell to Send All Regex Matches to a New File
Yesterday I had to look at a list of stuff on a third-party website and match it up to a list of stuff we control. It took quite a bit of time and some Excel shenanigans to complete the task and as I know it’s going to crop up again, I decided to employ PowerShellContinue reading “Use PowerShell to Send All Regex Matches to a New File”
The type or namespace name ‘ApplicationInsights’ does not exist in the namespace ‘Microsoft’
If you uninstall the Application Insights package from a .NET Core MVC project, you might get a few errors as it can’t “remove all the references” that might have made it into your application. The changes to StartUp.cs will be pretty self-explantory, but elsewhere you will get something a bit more off-the-wall as it referencesContinue reading “The type or namespace name ‘ApplicationInsights’ does not exist in the namespace ‘Microsoft’”