SQL Server supports exporting data-tier applications (BACPAC). It means that database is packaged to one file with schema and data. It’s not same as SQL Server backups but to backup smaller databases it works pretty well. Those who don’t want to mess with local backup storage can use cloud services like Azure Blob Storage to keep database backups. Here’s the example how I automated backup of one not so big database using free tools SqlPackage and AzCopy.

One of the new features in .NET 6 is support for global using declarations. We can define using declarations as global and they work all over the project so we don’t have to define them in other files anymore. Here’s how it works.

Hopefully the era of leprosy and corona is over for this time and it’s time to get back to blogging. Exceptions are powerful feature of object-oriented languages as far as they are used like they are thought to use – throw exception only when something really unexpected happens. This advice should be taken seriously – here’s why.

During moving one system from classic ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET Core I faced an interesting challenge. Although access to system is based on Active Directory there is separate role management based on classic membership and roles providers. There are reasons why AD is not used for role management and I cannot change it. ASP.NET Core uses claims-based authentication and I needed to find a way to add role claims to authenticated identity. Here’s the solution.

Although .NET 5 is officially in RC and not yet officially supported on Azure cloud we can still deploy ASP.NET Core web applications built for .NET 5 to Azure App Services. I made my first ASP.NET Core 5.0 deployment to Azure App Service last week. There has been no problems on Azure side and my application is running very stable. Here’s how I did it.

My fellow MVP Jiří Činčura wrote a nice blog post about hosting ASP.NET Core applications on Azure B-series small virtual machines: Running ASP.NET Core app on Azure B1ls VM (penny pinching). It’s the cheapest option on Azure for small applications. In this blog post I give you some additional advice about smallest B1-series virtual machines so you can build up a little safety net for your applications to make sure they don’t run out from resources.

My previous post about Surface Go 2 was brief introduction based on my own experiences after one month of using it. Surface Go 2 is lightweight machine with limited hardware resources. It’s not your next portable dev machine as it’s more to the tablets world but still there are some software development options to consider before buying Surface Go 2. Here’s my advice.

I decided to isolate Azure storage account behind this blog due to growing number of attacks against this little nice reading corner. I have anyway Azure CDN service enabled and it is perfect tool to get all static content of this blog as close to my dear readers as possible. Azure storage can be expensive and this is why I don’t want unbuffered traffic to land there, specially if it is generated by bunch of bots that doesn’t commit to glory of this blog anyhow. Here’s how to restrict public access to Azure storage account but keeping blob storage open…

C# 9.0 comes with nice new feature called top-level programs. It’s something that teachers of beginner classes will love for sure. Imagine – you start teaching C# with only two lines of code on screen. All missing code is generated by compiler. This blog post introduces top-level programs and shows some secrets of new C# compiler.

When working with stateless sessions in NHibernate we need some way to see generated SQL but we cannot use simple tricks as custom NHibernate interceptor to log SQL queries. As I’m using mostly NHibernate LINQ these days I was interested in how to get SQL out from LINQ query without actually executing it. Here’s my solution.