Open Source

Improve the already-great Windows Terminal experience by following these tips for customizing the application to work best for you.

During our projects at endjin, we often find ourselves evangelising Behaviour Driven Development, and specifically SpecFlow. In this post we look at a technique for defining complex test data objects in your Gherkin feature files, which we've also made available via the endjin-sponsored Corvus.NET project.

See how to manage consistent default configuration across all your .NET projects by using NuGet build assets.

As part of our work with OceanMind, endjin wrote a high performance .NET AIS parser. AIS (Automatic Identification System) is how commercial ships report location information. This blog describes the parser, and the performance techniques it uses.

Porter is a tool based on the CNAB (Cloud Native Application Bundle) spec. It can be used for building, managing, and installing application bundles. This guide will walk you through how to get set up with Porter on Windows.

The Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library helps you get up and running with CNAB and Porter. We've built quickstarts covering solutions like WordPress, Ghost, Mattermost, and data platforms like Apache Airflow, SQL Server AlwaysOn clusters and Kubernetes features like an nginx ingress controller and an Azure AD enabled OAuth2 Proxy. We've condensed all our learnings from the past 9 months of working on the project and turned them into a 10 minute video which explains all the key concepts. We hope this video helps accelerate your own CNAB & Porter epiphanies!

In partnership with Microsoft, we have released Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library on GitHub. CNAB (Cloud-Native Application Bundle) is a new specification designed for facilitating the packaging, installation, upgrading and uninstallation of cloud-native solutions in the cloud, on-premise or on the edge. We've created a number of quickstarts covering Apache Airflow, Azure Kubernetes Service, Ghost, Kubeflow, SQL Server Always On and Wordpress to help demonstrate the power of CNAB and Porter.

In this post, Ian describes some of the highlights from the NDC London conference

Expression Trees are one of .NET's super powers; but they are hugely overlooked and misunderstood. They can be used for on-the-fly code generation; building DSLs, and producing high performance computational algorithms. I'm trying to gather evidence about how you are using them, to make a case for future investments in the Expression Tree subsystem in .NET Core / .NET 5.0

We worked on a project recently which required us to build a highly performant system for processing vast quantities of messages in real time. We had made the decision to run this processing using Azure Functions with C#. This post runs through some of the techniques we used for writing highly performant, low allocation code, including data streaming, list preallocation and the relatively new C# feature: Span<T>.

Here at endjin we've done a lot of work around data analysis and ETL. As part of this we have done some work with Databricks Notebooks on Microsoft Azure. Notebooks can be used for complex and powerful data analysis using Spark. Spark is a "unified analytics engine for big data and machine learning". It allows you to run data analysis workloads, and can be accessed via many APIs. This means that you can build up data processes and models using a language you feel comfortable with. They can also be run as an activity in a ADF pipeline, and combined with Mapping Data Flows to build up a complex ETL process which can be run via ADF.

A good test suite should validate behaviour across your code base, testing as many edge cases as reasonably possible. A common "edge case", is passing a null value when a value isn't expected to be null. In Specflow, all values used in scenario examples are treated as strings, so it isn't possible (by default) to pass in a null value. However, using "Step Argument Transformations", we can achieve the desired behaviour. Read this blog to learn how this can be implemented.

Here is a quick dive into encryption and blockchain. This post goes into the ideas behind hashing, and how these translate into encrypted messaging techniques. It also delves blockchain and how signing and versioning allow for consistent and immutable transactions. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in these concepts!

It is with a huge amount of honour to announce that endjin co-founder, Howard van Rooijen, has been awarded an Azure MVP award for his contributions to the Azure ecosystem.

Mike Larah shares his tips for how to best customize ConEmu to improve your terminal experience for Windows Command Prompy and PowerShell

We&apos;ve built and open-sourced a Visual Studio Extension that provides basic support for discovering and running CucumberJS tests with Node.JS, in the Visual Studio Test Environment.