Paweł Bulwan

I’ll share my experience with an attempt to create a self-hosted Azure DevOps agent that would be identical to agents running on the Microsoft-hosted agent pool. At first, I expected that I can just google and find a VHD or VHDX files for DevOps agents. But I couldn’t find any. Why we wanted to create … Read more

Sometimes when we develop unit tests it’s convenient to check if the tested code wrote something to the log. Is it a good practice to assert that some particular message appeared in the logs? I think there are pros and cons. On the pros side, we can make general assertions like “no errors were written … Read more

I have recently observed that my Visual Studio Code synchronization no longer seemed to work. The configuration which I carefully changed at home was still not synced on my workplace machine. If you have a similar problem and found this blogpost in Google, read on 🙂 Diagnosing it turned out to be easy once you … Read more

One of the common ways to do two-factor Authentication is to use an authenticator app like Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, 1Password or LastPass Authenticator. Authy manages one-time passwords The common denominator of Authy and other apps mentioned above is that they generate time-based one-time passwords (TOTP). They are usually set up like in the screenshot below. … Read more

This is a short note showing my fix to an error I encountered when migrating application from .NET Framework to the most recent (at the moment) .NET 6. I’m just pasting the rough code example of how this can be migrated, because: I couldn’t find it anywhere in the Internet I spent some boring hours … Read more

A typical reference to a NuGet package in your project might look like In the above example, we can see that we reference a package Newtonsoft.Json in a specific version, 11.0.1. We don’t specify any constraints for a person or a tool that would like to update the version in reference. Now, let’s take a … Read more

Which of the following lines, in your opinion, is a better choice for logging a trace to Azure App Insights? I must admit that for a long time, I used the string interpolation (option A). It is concise, has no characters that would be redundant, and does the job. But it turns out, that the … Read more

I like to maintain a zero-warning policy in a project. In the case of false-alarm warnings, I think it’s better to suppress them than to leave them active. When we suppress a warning, it will not draw our attention every time we look at logs. So, how can we suppress a warning like the example … Read more

Cosmos DB can be configured with a Geo-Redundancy feature enabled. In such situation, it is supposed to replicate data to multiple regions. We should also be able to read from all of those regions. In this article, you will learn how to query a specific region of an Azure Cosmos DB database. In the Azure … Read more

What is Query Acceleration Query acceleration is a feature in Azure Blob Storage that can be handy if you use Data Lake (or general Blob Storage) to keep your data. The feature allows server-side filtering of data, assuming it’s in one of the supported formats, like JSON or CSV. It can result in limiting the … Read more