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LessThanDot

A decade of helpful technical content

This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.

Help me kick off Wausau PASS!

When I started attending Wisconsin SQL Server Users Group in 2009, that was the only PASS chapter in Wisconsin. Since then, we’ve expanded to include MADPASS, FoxPASS, Western WI PASS, and Microsoft BI Professionals – WI. These chapters have provided hundreds of hours of free training for hundreds of data professionals in the last few years. What’s been missing, in my opinion, is a lack of options for people living in north-central Wisconsin and Michigan’s UP.

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The Standing Desk

I hear that, “Sitting is the new smoking.” We’re supposed to stand more often, walk more often, move more often. I’m an active person (running and biking regularly) – but not while working. After using the same basic desk (not designed for office work) for several years, I decided to purchase a desk meant for someone who is on the computer all day. Coworkers recommended The Human Solution’s UPLIFT Desk. With a wide variety of options for the frame, the top, and the accessories, along with a decent warranty, free shipping, and reasonable pricing, here is the setup I picked.

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Self-Hosted Web – Updating assets without restarting the debugger

When you work with an ASP.Net project through Visual Studio, you can edit static files like CSS and JS files and see them immediately in your browser. Switch to a console application and self-hosted option, such as a self-hosted WebAPI or NancyFX site, and you’ll find that editing Content files will require restarting the debugger to see the changes. I’ve lived with this in the past, but the regular delay became annoying so I decided to find a solution.

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ASP.Net – Single-sign on against Office365 with OAuth2

Recently I was experimenting with Office 365 as a single-sign on source for an existing ASP.Net application. Unfortunately, most of the documentation I found focused on the use cases of having Visual Studio automatically add it as part of a new project, multiple versions of a very similar looking OWIN sample using built-in (black box) OpenId calls, and using Microsoft.Identity.Clients.ActiveDirectory in not terribly well explained example code to (I think) call the OAuth endpoints.

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Help, my company won't pay for training!

Tim Mitchell (b | t) asked me an interesting question: “What should you do if your employer won’t support your career development?” It’s a question I had to answer early in my career, and I am going to share my challenges and solutions. My first IT jobs were help desk. After taking classes at FVTC, I got to help the DBA write reports. I was very interested in SQL Server and database development, but I knew I didn’t know much.

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Testing SQL Server with an Application

I’ve been blogging about SQL Server for years. Most of these blogs are designed for the database administrator or developer, and thus use SQL Server Management Studio exclusively. (Back in the day, I’d show SSRS a lot, too.) But one of the questions that’s always been at the back of my mind is, “What does this look like from an application perspective?” I’ve been asking this question even more lately, as I work with Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2016 features like Data Masking and Row Level Security.

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Time to pack your tent for That Conference 2016!

Every summer, Wisconsin is full of campers. (I’m one of them! My favorite places to camp are Copper Falls State Park, Devil’s Lake State Park, and Hartman Creek State Park.) In August, there’s even a summer camp for geeks – That Conference! What conference? That Conference! This year, come camping with us August 8-10. You’ll stay at the Kalahari Resort & Waterpark. Bring the family – between waterslides, petting zoos, and pig roasts, everyone will have fun.

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Improved TeamCity .Net Build Warnings

A few years back, I posted “Displaying .Net Build Warnings in TeamCity”. Many folks found it useful (and it served as a good reference the last time I needed to re-setup warnings). Recently, Mitch Terlisner reached out to me with a much improved version to share with folks that includes better build status output, an interactive warnings tab, statistics chart, and a custom metric to enable custom failure rules:

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ASP.Net – Ensure your Actions aren't missing Authorization with Unit Tests

Have you ever found yourself working on an ASP.net Action and noticed there isn’t a single Authorization attribute in sight? Or gone to edit an endpoint in WebAPI, only to realize you took a coffee break at exactly the wrong time and forgot to come back and add the authorization attribute…a month ago? Or the time you found an MVC endpoint with WebAPI Authorization attributes on it? While relying on code reviews and regular reminders to the team can reduce occurrences of this, we’re human and can only catch so much.

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MVVM – The User as an Asynchronous API (w/ Knockout)

Early into development of a fairly large modular SPA, we found ourselves needing to ask the user a series of complex questions during a complex chain of business logic. We built a quick little ViewModel and template to display to the user, added some assignable callbacks that it would generate buttons for, and called it good. Except it wasn’t. The first issue we ran into was the difficulty in writing tests around this already incredibly complex business case and trying to fake expected user interaction with the callbacks.

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