Blog

This blog is part of a series around design patterns. This post focuses on the facade pattern. The facade pattern provides an interface into a complex system, in order to simplify access to the functionality.

Data insights are useless, and even dangerous (as we've seen recently at Public Health England) if they can't be trusted. So, the need to validate business rules and security boundaries within a data solution is critical. This post argues that if you're doing anything serious with data, then you should be taking this seriously.

This post describes the reasons for choosing specific & immutable dependency versions in your software.

Enabling C# 8's nullable references feature often produces a lot of warnings. Avoid the temptation to make some go away by initializing properties to empty strings.

Fix the "You need permission" error in Azure Synapse Analytics with this guide, addressing its causes and solutions for Data Engineers/Developers.

Assign roles in Synapse Studio for Azure Synapse Analytics devs using Azure CLI. Accessible by Owners/Contributors of the resource.

Investigate the decorator pattern in this blog post, a design pattern used to dynamically enhance object functionality.

GitOps — operations by pull request — isn't just for Kubernetes. See how the declarative, Git-as-source-of-truth model benefits any team managing infrastructure.

Despite the subsequent media reporting, the loss of 16,000 Covid-19 test results at Public Health England wasn't caused by Excel. This post argues that a lack of an appropriate risk and mitigation analysis left the process exposed to human error, which ultimately led to the loss of data and inaccurate reporting. It describes a simple process that could have been applied to prevent the error, and how it will help if you're worried about ensuring quality or reducing risk in your own business, technology or data programmes.

Switching the Microsoft Authenticator App to a new phone for a work or school account requires updating your Security Info at office.com: here are the exact steps.

Develop habits that smooth the path to C# 8.0 nullable references: starting with avoiding the common misuse of the 'as' operator. Use casts or pattern matching.

Explore Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB's impact on 'full stack serverless', No-ETL, and pay-as-you-query analytics.

Building a system that solves even just 10% of a problem is a worthwhile endeavour, not just because of the value the 10% delivers but because its mere existence will lower the barrier-to-entry for your colleagues to collaboratively iterate on it - not so much 'Build it and they will come' as 'Build a road and they will come'

When legacy or external code doesn't fit your interfaces, the adapter pattern wraps it behind the expected API so your system can use it without modification.

Often when building software we need to outsource part of the solution to a third party. Common examples include authentication, payment, and email, but there are many others. When first designing a solution the decision around which provider to use can be difficult to tackle. At endjin we have developed a system for answering the question "which provider should I use?".

Explore using Axios interceptors to streamline UI logic for async HTTP APIs, addressing long-running operations and client coordination efficiently.

Wishing Azure Synapse Analytics had support for SQL notebooks? Fear not, it's easy to take advantage rich interactive notebooks for SQL Pools and SQL on Demand.

Simplify dependency consumption & streamline integration with meta/virtual NuGet packages and tools like Dependabot.

How we diagnosed unexpected allocations in AIS.NET, comparing ArrayPool<T> vs MemoryPool<T> to hit zero-allocation per-message GC targets in a .NET parsing library.

Explore building a command line tool with System.CommandLine packages, using dependency injection for quick and easy initialization.

C# 8's nullable references feature can clash with common serialization techniques. This article shows how to deal with that.

Explore an alternative "invite user" flow for Azure AD B2C, simplifying authentication without custom policies in SaaS applications.

Explore the importance of DoesNotReturn & DoesNotReturnIf attributes in C# 8 nullable references, enhancing their long-standing role in C#.

Explore deploying Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces using ARM templates, a popular infrastructure deployment method for organizations.

Explore a pattern for async initialization, enabling readonly object construction & leveraging nullable references for fully instantiated classes.