.NET Core, what is my OS

There are a few cases where it is very useful to know the OS your .NET Core application is running on. One of those cases is when you need to set a time zone. Each OS does have its own naming of time zones. You can just try and catch the exception and then retry for another OS, however, if you know the OS, then it is far nicer to do this without exception handling.

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Injecting a Scoped service into IHostedService

In our projects we are using IHostedService to run background processes. What I have seen is that when injecting a scoped service into the IHostedService you get a InvalidOperationException on startup. The first time you get this exception, it is takes some time to figure out what is going on. This blog post will help you to resolve the problem faster.

Run maintenance jobs on Azure SQL

Many users on Azure SQL Server do not realize they have to do their own maintenance on Indexes. This index will slowly become fragmented and the performance will decrease over time. Azure SQL does not have a Job scheduler (agent) like on premise. In this post I’ll describe how to schedule a maintenance job from an ASP.NET Core application.

Access XML SOAP services in .NET Core and client certificates (SSL)

Only a few years back Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was the way to do communication on the Microsoft platform based on SOAP protocol. Now a days new services are mostly build on top of Representational State Transfer (REST) Services. Sometimes you have to access a ‘legacy’ SOAP services for .NET Core. .NET Core has limited WCF support. In this blog post I’ll explain how to consume SOAP services form .NET Core.

Run scheduled background tasks in ASP.NET Core

In the previous blog post called background tasks with ASP.NET Core using the IHostedService Peter described how to use the IHostedInterface for background tasks. In this post, we continue on this subject and add some pointers on how to perform scheduled background tasks.

In many software projects, there are repetitive tasks; some do just repeat every x seconds after the last instance is finished but you might also have to run a task on a schedule like every 10 minutes. When building repeating or scheduled tasks there are many options on how to approach the scheduling and this approach can be influenced by a number of technical choices.

Building the scheduling yourself is an option when you do not want to add extra dependencies to your project, have full control or just want an extra technical challenge. An out of the box solution you can a look at Hangfire, Quartz.net, or an external service that does an http call every x seconds to trigger the task (something like Pingdom).

Upgrade ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core 2.0 to 2.1

In the past weeks we have upgraded our ASP.NET Core 2.0 project to 2.1. The main reason for the upgrade is using the latest signalr capabilities and hosted services. The issues we had are related to the features we use. In our case the upgrade encountered some minor issues. In this blog post I’ll show what we had to change and give some tips on how to upgrade.

WebHost CreateDefaultBuilder, what differs if you run in Development

When building ASP.NET Core 2 web applications, most projects are initializing Kestrel with the CreateDefaultBuilder. If you use this extension method to configure Kestrel, it is good to know what is set and what differs when you are running a Development configuration or any other configuration. In practice there are two differences. In this blog I’ll explain the two differences.

ASP.NET Core background processing with IHostedService

Many services need background processing. The ASP.NET Core 2.X IHostedService interface gives you an easy implementation skeleton to implement background processes. The Hosted Services are registered in the dependency injection at startup and started automatically. You do not have to do the pluming to get them started at startup. On shutdown you can implement a graceful shutdown. When running background processes there a few pitfalls to avoid. In this blog I’ll introduce the IHostedService and how to avoid common memory leaks when implementing the hosted service.

Introduction to ChatOps

ChatOps is an accelerator for the implementation of DevOps. DevOps is all about enabling the team to get feature s into production quickly. This is done by unifying Dev and Ops and advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction. ChatOps is a way of combining and centralizing all the tooling for your team into one shared messaging tool. By centralizing access to your systems to one central messaging tool, you increase transparency, collaboration and productivity of you team.

Cannot access a disposed object in ASP.NET Core when injecting DbContext

Working with ASP.NET core I have seen this error multiple times and can be hard to debug. The error can have multiple root causes. It can be a real pain to find the cause and it is sometimes fixed by only taking care of the symptoms. By finding the root cause, you can take the appropriate action in your code.