Sometimes you need to allow ping requests for monitoring purposes. By default, it could be disabled on Windows machines. To enable it, you can use the following command: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Allow Ping" protocol=icmpv4 dir=in action=allow [read more]

Http Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a security mechanism that instructs the browser to automatically redirect http requests to https before sending a request to the server. When you are developing a web application, you should disable HSTS for localhost. This is because enabling HSTS on localhost has implications for other applications. For instance, some applications start a local web server and… [read more]

When you need to access a shared resource, you can use the lock statement or a synchronization primitive such as a Mutex to synchronize access to the resource. However, it's easy to forget it in complex code. When you need to synchronize access to a single resource, you can use a var obj = new object(); var value = 42; lock (obj) { // You need to ensure you use lock everywhere you access the shared… [read more]

ManualResetEventSlim represents a thread synchronization event that, when signaled, must be reset manually. This is a common synchronization primitive. However, it doesn't expose a method to wait asynchronously. Hopefully, it's not too complicated to create an extension method using ThreadPool.RegisterWaitForSingleObject and TaskCompletionSource. static class Extensions { public static Task WaitAsync(this… [read more]

Microsoft Graph is a REST API that allows you to interact with Microsoft 365 services. You can use it to automate tasks such as creating users, updating their properties, or exporting data. In this post, I'll show you how to export user email addresses and aliases from Microsoft Entra using PowerShell. First, you need to install the Microsoft.Graph module: Install-Module Microsoft.Graph -Scope CurrentUser… [read more]

Someone asked me why I write blog posts. So, let's write a blog post about why I write blog posts! Reason 1: I forget things As a developer, you learn lots of new things every day. But my memory has limited capacity, so I also forget a lot of things. One solution is to dump part of my knowledge into blog posts. Also, as my blog is public, I can then use my favorite search engine to find things when… [read more]

Automated tests are important to ensure the quality of your application. In the literature, you'll find many kinds of automated tests such as unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, smoke tests, and so on. I don't like this naming because some tests don't fit in a category and people give different meanings to them making it. Tests are about trade-offs: Confidence: Does the test ensure the… [read more]

Raspberry Pi's are very useful, but I find the LEDs very annoying. In this post, I describe how to disable all LEDs on a Rasberry PI. note Tested on Raspberry Pi 4B and Raspberry Pi 3B+ Connect to the Raspberry Pi with SSH Open the file /boot/config.txt as admin using sudo nano /boot/config.txt Add the following line at the end of the file: # Disable Power LED (Red) dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=off # Disable… [read more]

Roslyn analyzers and source generators are useful but it's not easy to start writing them. The documentation is not at the same level as .NET or ASP.NET Core. There are some good resources on the internet. In this post, I share some resources to help you write Roslyn analyzers and source generators. View Syntax tree and IOperation tree When you write a Roslyn analyzer, you need to understand the syntax… [read more]

The Windows Server image contains a .wim file which is bigger than 4GB. This is a problem because FAT32 does not support files bigger than 4GB. To solve this problem, we need to split the .wim file into smaller files. This can be done with the dism command. The following script extracts the content of the ISO file, splits the .wim file, formats the USB drive, and copies the files to the USB drive. # TODO… [read more]