I was lucky enough to hear Mads Torgersen (The Lead Designer of the C# language) speak at NDC London about some of the plans the team has for the next version of C#. Many of these new features are in the preview stage, and can be enabled by using the c# preview flag in your csproj file. The C# team welcomes feedback on...
I have just come home from volunteering at NDC London. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. I met some great people and had a lot of fun. I can’t wait to go back next year. You may have heard of NDC London before. It is a conference for software developers. It is held in London every year and attracts people...
Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that lets you query, visualise, and alert on metrics. It pairs well with Prometheus for scraping application endpoints. This post walks through a Docker Compose stack that monitors a simple .NET API. Setting up Grafana To visualise metrics data, we need a few...
A few weeks ago I talked about .Net Aspire , well lets take a look at how we can use it with Elasticsearch. Elastic search is a powerful search engine that can be used to index and search data. It is built on top of Lucene and provides a powerful way to search through your data. Aspire allows dependencies like...
Managing dependencies in .NET projects can become complex, especially when dealing with multiple projects that share common packages. NuGet Central Package Management (CPM) is a feature that simplifies this process by allowing you to manage package versions centrally. What is NuGet Central Package Management? NuGet...
A long time ago in my SysAdmin days, I was a big fan of Nagios . Recently, I decided to revisit it and see if I could run it in a Docker container to monitor my local network. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Nagios monitoring using Docker. Finding a Docker Image for Nagios First, we need to...
It is that time of year again, time to reflect on the year that has passed and look forward to the year ahead. As with many years 2024 has been a mixed bag, some good stuff, and some not so good stuff. I did not make any goals at the start of 2024, but I am going to fix that for 2025. Goals for 2025 Blog Posts More...
Creating pull requests is part of day-to-day Git work: you propose changes, review them, and merge. Long-lived integration branches make that tedious if someone has to open the release PR by hand every time. Automatic pull requests keep a develop → main (or master) PR open and refreshed when develop moves. Below are...
AI is everywhere at the moment, from chatbots to code completion tools like GitHub Copilot. Here are some common AI and Copilot terms with explanations. Common AI and Copilot Terms Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to...