2020-11 on Funky Si's Test

Weekly update 003: progress notes

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Been a quiet week, so wasn’t expecting to have much to write on here, however a few things happened worth talking about.

My First PR

A comment was made to me to do something with the postcodes that are in the system I am developing. Find out what projects have postcodes near each other, and that way work can be grouped together and reduce potential mileage costs of staff that need to visit these projects.

A quick google search found https://postcodes.io/ which has an API that returns nearby postcodes. It also has a C# wrapper https://github.com/markembling/MarkEmbling.PostcodesIO

A comparison of what was being returned from the wrapper and what the API said should be returned revealed that the distance between postcodes wasn’t being returned.

As the code was on GitHub I could easily see how easy or difficult it might be to add the missing bit of information. It was easy! So, I forked the repo and made the change. I published the change to a private NuGet repo in my Azure Dev Ops account. That way I could try my revised package to check it did what I wanted.

I left a message on the GitHub project letting the owner know I had a potential fix for an issue. The project hadn’t been updated in over a year, so the owner may not be interested, or the project may have been abandoned.

I was in luck just 17 hours after I left a message the project owner said to create a Pull Request, which I did and shortly afterwards my code had been merged in and an updated version of the package existed in the public NuGet feed.

I have been thinking about contributing to open source for a while. However, I had not seen a project I wanted to contribute to, or a problem that I knew how to fix until now that is.

PHP

This week I had a call asking me if I knew PHP?

I did, over ten years ago, before I got my first IT job, I spent time learning PHP and MySQL. I created a blog, and I also created a website for my Dad’s camera club. The code I created back then was awful. No shared code, all the code was associated with the page, or sorts of bugs occurred and as time went by it became increasingly hard to update. The site was well liked but I eventually lost interest and moved on to learn other things.

This call led to me talking with the head of IT, and later a couple of the developers who have since granted me access to the codebase of a project.

I haven’t had time to spend a lot of time looking at the code so far, however this is nothing like the PHP I had built before.

The project makes use of the laravel framework and the first file I opened had methods and classes, so apart from the syntax you could think you were looking at C#.

Another thing that interested me was the project used docker containers, it has automated builds as well. Lots of modern programming ideas that I had some ideas about. I am looking forward to learning more about this project and how I might contribute to it.

Weekly Update #002

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I know Active Directory is fussy about clocks being in sync however not sure how todays issue happened.

I run my docker compose file from Visual Studio and I get a weird error.

SecurityTokenNotYetValidException: IDX10222: Lifetime validation failed. The token is not yet valid. ValidFrom: 'System.DateTime', Current time: 'System.DateTime'.

I deleted my containers, open and close Visual Studio a few times, nothing helps. Eventually I think to find out what the time is on my container. It has yesterday’s date. What has happened here? Surely recreating containers would have caused them to have todays date? I reboot and everything is fine again.

Turns out that it is a know issue, see https://thorsten-hans.com/docker-on-windows-fix-time-synchronization-issue I am using WSL2 and I have now changed back to using Hyper-V and the issue hasn’t come back.

Earlier in the week I spotted my build step was failing.

 - task: NuGetToolInstaller@0

Swapping to the next version of the step is all I needed to do to fix it.

 - task: NuGetToolInstaller@1

My guess is that support was dropped for this earlier version or there is some other incompatability with .Net 5.

Weekly Update #001

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite podcasts is Troy Hunts weekly update. In it he discusses stuff that he has been working on, plus some personal stuff. I am going to attempt to do something similar. It will probably take me a few of these before we get a look and feel that works.

Monday

A week off work, mainly to use it up before year end, plus want to get a few jobs around the house done.

I did ask the following question on Twitter.

Hey #azurefamily and #dotnet developers how do I get more involved in mentoring?
— Simon Foster (@funkysi1701) November 9, 2020

As a one person dev team, my biggest weakness is working with others so any ideas of how to change that are great.

Tuesday

Dotnet 5 is out! The latest version of dotnet is released by Microsoft and to celebrate there is dotnetconf to listen to. Due to time zones and family commitments, I haven’t listened to an awful lot of it but I did see the keynote and loved the 3 Scott’s chat.

Wednesday

My youngest son was 3 today, due to Coronavirus we didn’t do much but we celebrated as a family, and he even had a zoom call.

Thursday

Blazor has a new feature Virtualize where a list of items can only load the ones on screen. I have been trying to get this to work on my blog, works great running locally but not working in production yet.

Think I know what might be happening. I use Cloudflare to do my SSL, as Custom SSL certs for the cheaper Azure Web Apps is not supported. Something in Cloudflare is caching or interfering.

https://zimmergren.net/solved-asp-net-core-blazor-web-sites-does-not-work-with-cloudflare-html-minification/

Turning off HTML minification fixed my issue!

One additional thing I added to my Blog is the config page which details some of the config settings. I think this probably came from https://www.hanselman.com/blog/adding-a-git-commit-hash-and-azure-devops-build-number-and-build-id-to-an-aspnet-website but it was a while ago when I first did this on another project.

At the moment we have .net Version, Commit and Build links.

The .Net Version is obtained from

@System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.FrameworkDescription

A few other bits of info can be obtained from System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation which I have included on the page for fun. There are probably security concerns with exposing all this info publicly so something to bear in mind if you try this.

Build Info is passed to my code by a build step

- script: '(echo $(Build.BuildNumber) && echo $(Build.BuildId)) > .buildinfo.json'
 displayName: "Emit build number"
 workingDirectory: '$(Build.SourcesDirectory)/src/WebBlog'
 failOnStderr: true

This simply passed the build id and number which are stored as variabled and saves them in a text file.

I then have a class that reads them and constructs a link.

using Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting;
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Reflection;

namespace WebBlog
{
 public class AppVersionInfo
 {
 private const string _buildFileName = ".buildinfo.json";
 private readonly string _buildFilePath;
 private string _buildNumber = string.Empty;
 private string _buildId = string.Empty;
 private string _gitHash = string.Empty;
 private string _gitShortHash = string.Empty;

 public AppVersionInfo(IHostEnvironment hostEnvironment)
 {
 _buildFilePath = Path.Combine(hostEnvironment.ContentRootPath, _buildFileName);
 }

 public string BuildNumber
 {
 get
 {
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildNumber))
 {
 if (File.Exists(_buildFilePath))
 {
 var fileContents = File.ReadLines(_buildFilePath).ToList();

 if (fileContents.Count > 0)
 {
 _buildNumber = fileContents[0];
 }
 if (fileContents.Count > 1)
 {
 _buildId = fileContents[1];
 }
 }

 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildNumber))
 {
 _buildNumber = DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("yyyyMMdd") + ".0";
 }

 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildId))
 {
 _buildId = "123456";
 }
 }

 return _buildNumber;
 }
 }

 public string BuildId
 {
 get
 {
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildId))
 {
 var _ = BuildNumber;
 }

 return _buildId;
 }
 }

 public string GitHash
 {
 get
 {
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_gitHash))
 {
 var version = "1.0.0+LOCALBUILD";
 var appAssembly = typeof(AppVersionInfo).Assembly;
 var infoVerAttr = (AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute)appAssembly
 .GetCustomAttributes(typeof(AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute)).FirstOrDefault();

 if (infoVerAttr != null && infoVerAttr.InformationalVersion.Length > 6)
 {
 version = infoVerAttr.InformationalVersion;
 }
 _gitHash = version[(version.IndexOf('+') + 1)..];
 }

 return _gitHash;
 }
 }

 public string ShortGitHash
 {
 get
 {
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_gitShortHash))
 {
 _gitShortHash = GitHash.Substring(GitHash.Length - 6, 6);
 }
 return _gitShortHash;
 }
 }
 }
}

The BuildId and BuildNumber properties just fetch the details saved into the text file during the build. This can then be passed to build the build link.

<a href="https://dev.azure.com/{OrgName}/{RepoName}/_build/results?buildId=@appInfo.BuildId&view=results">
 @appInfo.BuildNumber
</a>

Finally, the GitHash properties need to fetch the hash and shorthash of the commit which is a bit more complex. This is achieved using the following line in your build.

- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
 displayName: 'Publish'
 inputs:
 command: 'publish'
 publishWebProjects: true
 arguments: '--output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory) /p:SourceRevisionId=$(Build.SourceVersion)'

/p:SourceRevisionId=$(Build.SourceVersion) add the revision hash to [assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion] during the build which can then be extracted using the gitHash property above, before being passed into the commit link.

<a href="https://github.com/{OrgName}/{RepoName}/commit/@appInfo.GitHash">
 @appInfo.ShortGitHash
</a>