Ken Dale

We run a number of web applications at Ritter Insurance Marketing. Our primary datastore for these applications is MSSQL / SQL Azure. Our deployments are brought online by swapping code from stagin...

We’ve been working through upgrading our core applications from ASP.NET full framework to ASP.NET Core. Over the years we’ve assembled an opinionated library for assembling full framework APIs name...

ConfigurationManager has long been used by .NET Framework developers prior to .NET Core to access things like app settings and connection strings. By including the System.Configuration.Configuratio...

We’ve had some internal discussion around the usage of RegexOptions.Compiled in .NET – how it works and when it’s appropriate to use it. Despite being named Compiled is isn’t compiled at build time...

Debugging web applications can be difficult sometimes. When debugging a failed HTTP GET request in Application Insights you have all of the information. But, when looking at failed HTTP POST/PUT/PA...

Autofac is an inversion of control container for .NET. It allows developers to register items and then later use those registrations to inject items into their classes as needed. Not all of the met...

We recently started using SendGrid to send emails in production. As part of that, we noticed that emails to outlook.com, hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com were met with responses that looked like this...

According to https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592 at the time of this blog post Chrome 80 is targeted to default cookies to SameSite=Lax when SameSite is not specified. This change...

Our RimDev.FeatureFlags library uses Newtonsoft.Json as part of roundtripping the on/off state in SQL. With that we use TypeNameHandling.All to serialize the type information as well. Putting aside...

In order to avoid having large files in our Git history we’ve been using Git Large File Storage (LFS). It commits a marker in the Git repository and uploads files to a separate place. On GitHub th...

About a year ago, RIMDev started a DevOps transformation. As part of that transformation, we started to use slots in Azure app services, deployed to multiple regions for resilience, and a whole lot...

Over the previous year we’ve been working to improve our overall uptime. While we aren’t prepared to offer 99.999% availability in the way a cloud provider may, we’re better prepared to meet unplan...

Our starting point This past year we’ve been on a DevOps journey. While we haven’t been in a state of stagnation or chaos as a team, we’ve identified areas where we could improve. We wanted to imp...

Our team maintains a private package that contains our strategy for database migrations. It runs migrations using FluentMigrator as well as other scripts. Running SQL statements inside SQL Azure c...

We use Microsoft Azure Application Insights in our web applications. It logs tons of useful data about our applications, including web requests and requests to dependencies like databases. We also ...

We use Microsoft Azure Application Insights in our web applications. It logs tons of useful data about our applications, including web requests and requests to dependencies like databases. We also ...

Feature flags can be useful for changing the runtime behavior of an application with minimal impact. Having a UI to toggle the feature flags on and off is extra helpful, too! That said, we built a...

What is a machine key? According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.web.security.machinekey?view=netframework-4.7.2 a machine key “Provides a way to encrypt or hash data (or bot...

We’re in the process of upgrading our infrastructure to run our Azure Web Apps in multiple datacenter locations behind Azure Traffic Manager instances to achieve high availability. Running multiple...

It can be tricky to run integration tests targeting a web server using the command line. Essentially, we need to: Start the application Wait for the application to be ready (begin responding ...

We’re in the process of scaffolding out our Microsoft Azure environments using Terraform. We’re looking at deploying consistently from master going forward, but our new infrastructure design requir...

Health checks in ASP.NET Core are useful for reporting the health of your ASP.NET Core web application. But, this functionality can’t directly be used with ASP.NET Full Framework applications. Tha...

As I’ve walked through upgrading a number of solutions to target a new version of the .NET Framework, I’ve compiled a list of helpful steps: Run git clean -xdf to remove files not in the reposi...

We’re in the process of scaffolding out our Microsoft Azure environments using Terraform. While Terraform does an excellent job creating Azure Web Apps, it still needs code to be deployed before th...

As you’re building out an API it’s important to keep response times in check. In many cases slowness is due to database calls, web requests, and other network operations. But, elevated response tim...

At Ritter Insurance Marketing we utilize Azure Web Apps for hosting many of our web applications. Azure Web Apps is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft, enabling their customers ...

The RimDev.Stuntman NuGet package has reached version 2.0! Unified package with ASP.NET Core 2.0 Support Both ASP.NET full framework and ASP.NET Core 2.0 supported by the RimDev.Stuntman package....

At Ritter Insurance Marketing we value our peers and other organizations in the overall software community. We believe in the power of community and open source. Why spend effort on a problem that...

At Ritter Insurance Marketing we have a number of repositories, each with separate continuous integration builds. This is a base setup for building and publishing .NET full framework applications ...

We ran across an issue where window.exports was being unexpectedly set. The cause <div id="exports"> ... </div> Why? In some browsers, DOM elements with ids are available as vari...

Sometimes it’s useful to ensure a project works with multiple versions of runtimes. In the following example, multiple versions of Node.js will be used to ensure a project builds successfully with ...

Update October 17, 2017 This doesn’t work with environment deployments, as this needs to run after the deployment has completed. See http://help.appveyor.com/discussions/questions/8741-more-info-o...

https://xkcd.com/1597/ While I generally don’t do that, here’s what I currently do: Setting up a repository locally Using Stuntman as an example: > git clone [email protected]:kendaleiv/stuntm...

Previously, I wrote about Publishing to npm Using AppVeyor. This is a similar post, but specifically geared toward publishing an npm package to MyGet. Setup environment variable In the AppVeyor w...

Typically, running a Jekyll site locally for the first time requires a basic knowledge of using the command line. It usually involves a few commands: bundle exec jekyll serve (with the optional --i...

AppVeyor does not currently provide built-in support for publishing to npm (at least, currently). Instead, we can provide the npm token as an AppVeyor UI configured environment variable and run npm...

Here’s some copy-pastable commands for creating SQL Server Express LocalDb instances: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\SqlLocalDB.exe" create "v11.0" 11.0 -s "C:\Program ...

We’ve made some good contributions to the world of open source this year. Our major projects are listed at our open source page. Stuntman Stuntman is a development time user switcher, helping you...

Imagine for a moment you’re an insurance agent selling a product to a client. You’re working with an web application that requires the client’s age. You ask the client. They reply with their date o...

Releasing new versions from continuous integration, rather than someone’s machine in a team environment is a great way to release new versions of npm packages in a predicable and controlled manner....

Last year we embarked on a mission to update the overall authentication and authorization strategy for Ritter Insurance Marketing. After evaluating the different options, we replaced our existing h...

Postman is a great tool for testing HTTP/HTTPS endpoints. It’s useful for quick tests, as well as authoring detailed test suites. Even tests that rely on the output of other tests can be assembled!...

Stuntman enables our team to work locally with multi-role ASP.NET applications quickly and easily. Stuntman enables developers to switch users at runtime in their ASP.NET web applications, without ...

On our team TeamCity server we build repositories by default using build.cmd in the repository root. This has a few advantages. One advantage is being able to run what TeamCity runs locally. It is...

We use Jekyll for this blog. If you’re running Windows, this post can help you get it working quickly. Here we go Use Chocolatey to install Ruby v2 and the associated Ruby Development Kit version...

Choosy devs choose Slack. It’s dev tested, mother approved. Slack has become the main source of our team collaboration. One of the benefits of Slack is the sheer number of pre-built integrations. ...

At Ritter Insurance Marketing, we utilize IdentityServer3 for our authentication mechanism. It has been almost a year of hosting in Windows Azure with great success. While it has been a positive ex...

At Ritter Insurance Marketing we utilize Azure Web Apps for hosting many of our web applications. Azure Web Apps is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft, enabling their customers ...