Monsters Weekly 220 - Previewing .NET 6 without installing the Preview SDK

There are so many great features in the .NET 6 previews but I don’t want to install the preview SDKs on my main work computer. Let’s take a look at how we can use VS Code Dev Containers to play with the .NET 6 previews without actually installing the preview SDK!

Remote Extension Pack:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.vscode-remote-extensionpack

.NET SDK Docker Images:
https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-sdk/

Monsters Weekly 219 - Playwright Trace Viewer

With the Playwright Trace Viewer, you’ll never need to wonder why your automated browser test failed. The Playwright Trace Viewer makes it easy to record and replay a full trace of everything that happened while running your test!

https://playwright.dev/docs/trace-viewer

Monsters Weekly 218 - Automated Accessibility Testing with Playwright + Axe

Accessibility is an important feature of any web application but we often leave it until late in the development process to start testing. With Axe and Playwright, we can easily automate a large amount of Accessibility testing which can help to ensure we don’t ship our apps/sites with Accessibility bugs.

Links:

https://github.com/abhinaba-ghosh/axe-playwright

https://www.deque.com/axe/core-documentation/api-documentation/#api-name-axeconfigure

https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core/blob/develop/doc/rule-descriptions.md

https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.2

Monsters Weekly 217 - Searching Text in SQL Server

When you have a lot of data in your SQL database, searching for substrings in a column can be slow. Don’t worry, Simon has some terrible awful, no good hacks that will get those queries running as fast as possible.

Monsters Weekly 216 - Zip Deploy for Azure Web Apps

Azure App Service makes it easy to deploy Web Apps from a Zip file. The Kudu portal provides a simple drag and drop UI for Zip deployments.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/deploy-zip

Monsters Weekly 215 - How I'm going to replace you with an automation script - Azure Automate

Using Azure Automate you can run scheduled tasks inside of Azure to tune resources, do repetitive tasks or event replace entire people on your team.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/automation/

Monsters Weekly 214 - Playwright Inspector and page.pause()

In this week’s episode, we discuss the mixed metaphors in Playwright naming. Specifically, we take a look at how pause() and Playwright Inspector can help you to understand what’s happening in your tests and help you to author new tests.

https://playwright.dev/docs/inspector

Monsters Weekly 213 - Local Testing with Azure Static Web Apps

Static Web Apps allows easy build+deploy scenarios for static web sites that use an API backend. In this video we’ll explore the basic concepts and look at hooking up the swa CLI to our pre-compiled as well as our externally hosted apps. Bring your own front end framework or API!

Get the tooling:

Monsters Weekly 212 - Deploying to Environments with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions now includes Environments as a first class citizen! You can define environments, including approvals and secrets. See how to easily split your CI/CD workflow into jobs that allow your deployment steps to target a specific environment.

GitHub Environments: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/environments
HTBox/TwoWeeksReady sample: https://github.com/HTBox/TwoWeeksReady/

Monsters Weekly 211 - .NET 5 on Azure Functions

Writing Azure Functions in C# has traditionally been a cool mashup of DLLs, dependencies and magic while Azure orchestrated the calls for you. But in today’s .NET 5 world, we get to take the reigns back with isolated processes.
In this episode we have a look at some of the changes and benefits of running in an isolated process, and consider some of the implications of those changes as we work with input and output bindings, queues and https triggers.

For more information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/dotnet-isolated-process-guide