Posts

The expectations surrounding app releases have changed greatly in the last several years. From months-long release cycles to release many times in a day. In part, this is made possible by smaller applications powered by micro services and some of the typical technologies employed with these applications. In particular, Containers bring a lot of new capabilities including easier deployments via orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. As a developer and team lead, one of the best added benefits of containers is how easy it is to spin up an environment for each change....

On multiple occasions, I found myself trying to check if a query for data read is safe to execute or not. This is typically useful when the query is saved outside of your code, and you cannot restrict the access level of the user executing it. The following regex, while not exhausting by any means, will detect most query patterns typically used to change data. Note that inserts, updates, deletes, and merges are permitted on temporary tables (e....

The input type date is a very nice control introduced in HTML5. The problem is that it is very limited at this point and features such as placeholder may not available. Regardless, you may use it successfully if you are willing to make some css adjustments. In this post I will show how to add a placeholder to a date editor using minimal javascript and css. For the demo below I’m using vanilla css and vuejs just because it is so easy to use....

I spent a few too many hours fiddling with Xamarin Form’s collection view and multi-selection binding. That was somewhat frustrating so I’m writing a little about it in the hopes that you don’t have to deal with the same. If you have a view like this: and a View Model like this: You’d expect the binding to work, right? No problems. Well, no. It doesn’t. The CollectionView will only bind SelectedItems to collections of object....

6 months ago I posted about Automatic release notes on Azure DevOps. Since then, I was able to make the process a little more centric to Pull Requests and avoid the occasional incorrect work item showing up in the release notes. The primary difference is that we will use the new Cross Platform Generate Release Notes task instead of the original Powershell based task. This updated version offers a little more control via handlebars extensions that can help us filter out the undesired work items....