Category: Tech blog
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How and why to take the long way for installing ADFS
I use several applications in my LAN – a bug/issue/ticket tracker, a knowledge base, Git and Mercurial servers, a continuous integration server… Administering users across each of them can be a lot of work, especially if it’s unnecessary: and I do have a Windows domain and an Active Directory server which is usually supposed to…
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Finding ASP.Net Core Error Logs on IIS
I don’t think there are many IT tasks more frustrating than troubleshooting Microsoft technologies on Windows. These things are simply not made so that anyone knows what’s going on, and the really brutal stuff happens when you combine Windows, IIS and Asp.Net Core. Correct me if I’m wrong, but by default it’s not configured to…
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Configuring Orchard Core for AD (AD FS) Authentication
How to set the Orchard Core CMS to use a local domain / Active Directory for authentication? The current Ochard version (1.1) doesn’t seem to support it, at least not that I know… It does support Azure AD but that is a different beast. One way to make it work is to install Active Directory…
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Repairing the WS-Management service on the Windows server
Some features of the Windows 2019 server can easily and inadvertently be incapacitated and many seem to get screwed up on their own. And it is quite possible that one error triggers another and getting out of that tangled mess is very hard and time consuming. It takes a lot of time just to restore…
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Short tips to getting Excel working with ASP.Net Core OData service
I’ve been tinkering with an Asp.Net Core OData service designed to be consumed by the Excel client… There are a lot of details that will screw your brains if you don’t get them right, and it doesn’t help that ASP.Net is a fidgety beast in that bits move around in each version and there are…
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VisualStudio install cache folder is important
I tried to find information about the “VisualStudio install cache” folder that Visual Studio installer creates, but was unable to find much. The folder takes a healthy couple of gigabytes of disk storage and, having the “cache” keyword in it, seems to be safe to delete. But deleting it will cripple Visual Studio updates. My…
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How to set a category for Visual Studio new item templates
A .vstemplate file defines a template for an item that appears in Visual Studio’s “Add New Item” dialog. But it doesn’t have an option to choose which of the categories (shown in the left part of the dialog) it will appear in. I know of two ways to use the .vstemplate file and there are…
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Implementing Equals() and GetHashCode() in ORM classes with autoincrement keys
The requirements for implementing Equals() and GetHashCode() in .Net are very hard to satisfy and in some areas nearly impossible. There are some situations where an object’s identity inevitably changes, and saving an ORM-mapped object with autogenerated key is a case in point. Making its hash code conform with requirements would require an inordinately large…
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Running 64-bit Ace OLEDB driver with 32-bit Office
When 32-bit Microsoft Office is installed on 64-bit Windows, there is a problem connecting to OLEDB sources using Microsoft Jet provider from .Net applications (and probably others). A .Net application, unless otherwise instructed, runs as 64-bit on 64-bit OS’s and expects a 64-bit OLEDB provider for Jet. But, since Office is 32-bit, there is no…
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Fluent API vs. named arguments for readability
Fluent APIs are great to make code readable – should I say, at the expense of verbosity? Because verbosity is, actually, one of the positive traits of being fluent. It is very useful in complex and hard to follow scenarios like data transformation (think LINQ), configuration, testing etc., leading the developer to the solution but…