Aaron Hoffman's Blog

I've recently had a need for a custom JsonConverter to read and write data to CosmosDb in a way that utilizes a CosmosDb document's `id` property. (more on that in a later post) My first step was to investigate a custom Newtonsoft.Json JsonConverter . I thought that there might be a BaseJsonConverter implementation somewhere in the docs, but I was wrong . After digging through many different custom converters, I think I've discovered what the most trivial custom converter might look like. You can find the example here, and customize it further to fit your needs: https://gist.github.com/aaronhoffman/de40ac508de95101fa41859195728e39 Hope this helps, Aaron

Project Gutenberg is an amazing site containing over 57,000 free ebooks at the time of this writing. Recently I've been working on a project to create a database of book bibliographies. A database of book references from within other books. You'd be able to answer the query: Show me all the books that reference "Thinking Fast and Slow". I plan to use Project Gutenberg as the repository that I use to create the first version of this database. Project Gutenberg currently makes their complete project catalog available as a collection of RDF files found here: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds RDF is not something I've worked with in the past, so I converted them to JSON files. You can download that set of files from here: https://sfp.blob.core.windows.net/public/gutenberg_catalog.zip Hope this helps, Aaron

I thought I'd compile some resources on ASP.NET Core 2.1 Identity . Hope you find these useful: Database schema of tables that are generated after the first EF Migration: https://gist.github.com/aaronhoffman/74f4c072afaa0459dcd6595b6380f67d You can override password rules in the Startup.cs class:             services.AddDefaultIdentity ()                 .AddEntityFrameworkStores ();             services.Configure (options =>             {                 options.Password.RequireDigit = false;                 options.Password.RequireLowercase = false;                 options.Password.RequireUppercase = false;                 options.Password.RequireNonAlphanumeric = false;             }); If you are wondering where the AccountController or login pages are (because they do not appear in the solution explorer by default) more info can be found here:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/scaffold-identity?view=aspnetcore-2.1&

When I'm working with a new repo/project in VSTS , I like to set up shortcuts in Google Chrome to be able to quickly jump to a specific Work Item, PR, Build, or Release based on the ID. To do this, I take advantage of Chrome's " other search engines " settings. You can manually add these by specifying a Short Name, a Keyword, and the URL to navigate to when that keyword is typed into the browser's address bar. Until now, I would manually add these URLs one at a time, but being a lazy developer, I wanted a way to automate this process. I discovered that Chrome uses a SQLite database to store these values, and you can side-load new entries by simply performing a SQL Insert into the `keywords` table of that SQLite database! You can use the following SQL Script to insert the default set of shortcuts I usually add for each new VSTS project/repo: https://gist.github.com/aaronhoffman/60660365310b7ff462b547fea9eb605b Steps to Add:  1. Ensure all instan

If you're looking to deploy a Visual Studio Database Project  via VSTS to Azure, you can use the Azure SQL Database Deployment  Release Task to include the deployment in your CI/CD process. When a .dbproj builds, it creates a .dacpac file that contains the database definition/schema. The DB Deployment Release Task uses the SqlPackage.exe executable to deploy/sync the target database with the definitions in the dacpac file. SqlPackage.exe can do more than just `publish`. However, at this time, the publish action is the only action supported by that release task. If you'd like to perform other actions (e.g. `DeployReport` or `Script`), you can call the SqlPackage.exe directly using a PowerShell Script Release Task. However, to do that, you'll need to know the location of the SqlPackage.exe on the VSTS host, because it is not available in the PATH by default. To find the location of SqlPackage.exe, the Azure SQL DB Deploy task uses this utility script:  https://git