stuartdobson.net blog

What exactly is DevOps? DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support. ( http://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/ ) Like Agile, it's a rather large topic, but the main point of it is that developers work much more closely with Operations to ensure a more resilient release cycle. It's also characterised by Operations using many of the same techniques as developers - for example: source control, automation, and of course the Agile methodology.  Adopted by all the big tech companies, DevOps allows for hyper-efficient deployments with much faster releases and far less production issues. In fact, the highest performers use DevOps to do 30x more deployments, 8000 times faster, 2x more successful, with 12x faster Mean Time To Repair than the worst performers (those who aren't using DevOps). As a result, Amazon deploy to Production e

In Visual Studio 2012+ there is a button in the Team Explorer you may not use as often as you should. "My Work" contains 4 sections. In Progress Work This contains your current "context", what you're currently working on, your pending code changes. Suspended Work This is the most interesting feature, I think. It allows you to change the context which you are working in so you can switch tasks on request. Imagine you're deep into coding a feature and an urgent bug is raised that demands immediate attention. Your code might not even compile yet but you have to drop it and get a working setup. Simple. Just hit "Suspend" and your current changes will be suspended. But not just your changes. This doesn't just save the current state of the source code, it saves EVERYTHING, breakpoints, watches, open windows. When the bug fix is complete and checked in, simply drag your suspended work back into the "In Progress" section. T

Here are some ways to fix the notorious "The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document" issue in Visual Studio. Many of the steps may not apply to your situation, but I've tried to make this a comprehensive list that you can check whenever you get this issue. Get latest code from Source Control Compile. Run iisreset to reset IIS if you are using IIS. Attach to the appropriate IIS instance (or all of them). Add a breakpoint and run your application. If you miss step 3, your breakpoint will not be hit, even though your assemblies has compiled and breakpoint is shown as active. You may need to run iisreset in an administrator command prompt to ensure you have the right permissions. Some more ideas if the above doesn't work: Check where your dll is being referenced from and ensure that is the code you're trying to debug. Check you are in the correct mode when building: Debug/Release as they may put the dlls in