After a long break, I had to do some maintenance work on an old PHP project again and this time I did not like the idea of installing the tooling natively on my new development machine. I decided to rather configure a Docker image and run the project in it.
If you do a lot of web development, I am sure there have been times when you have wanted to expose your application running on your local machine to the internet to debug why it's not behaving as expected. I know this has happened to me more than once. Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to do this with minimal effort, and to certain extent even for free.
I haven't done much PHP development, but occasionally I still need to read or write some PHP code. The latest reason for this was a CMS site for a local community organization I'm administering. I was asked to modify its template to show a different logo based on where in the sitemap the current page is located. How hard could it be?
I've been pretty busy since early summer, spending most of my spare time recording a video course about features for debugging and testing in Visual Studio 2017. Since Monday, the first part of this video course is finally available to everyone.
The official Android emulator has a big disadvantage for regular users of Hyper-V: you cannot run the emulator accelerated when Hyper-V is enabled. Fortunately, there is an alternative: Visual Studio Emulator for Android, which uses Hyper-V for hardware acceleration.
Ionic 2 is the successor to the quite popular hybrid mobile framework. It is based upon Angular 2, but unlike it, it hasn't yet reached the final release; the latest version is Release Candidate 3. This makes it still a bit rough around the edges and lacking in documentation. Debugging with source maps is one of the features, which still pose a challenge to set up for many developers.
Having unit tests usually drastically reduces the need for interactive debugging. However, being able to debug unit tests can sometimes prove very useful. Nowadays, any browser includes a fully featured debugger as part of its developer tools, and Karma test runner has a dedicated feature for in-browser debugging. I wrote short instructions on how exactly to use this feature for a project I am working on.
Recently I was involved in troubleshooting a strange performance issue, manifesting itself in the form of long initialization time of each newly created process or AppDomain on one of the servers. In the end it turned out, it was caused by assembly binding log being enabled on that machine for a long time.
When an application starts misbehaving in production, attaching a debugger to alive process is out of the question. Creating a memory dump and analyzing it in WinDbg is the way to go. Most of us are required to do this on rare occasions only. To make it easier for me in the time of crisis, I created a short cheat sheet.
SlowCheetah is a very useful Visual Studio extension which builds upon Visual Studio's built-in support for Web.config transformations. It adds similar XDT transformation file support to non-web projects which can be used even during debugging, while built-in solution for web projects only works for web deployment. There is already a feature request for SlowCheetah for it, but until it's implemented, you'll need to find a different solution.
According to the C# language specification, the static field initializer should execute before it is accessed for the first time. As it seems, looking up the field value in debugger doesn't trigger the initializer.