Jun 192015
 

Visual Studio Online (VSO) has a new build system that will eventually replace the old XAML based system.

VSO now also lets you perform builds using an on-prem build agent (or one hosted in a VM on Azure etc.).

I haven not been able to find information about this, but I assume that using on-prem agents will not count against the VSO build minutes. I assume that running builds are “free” contrary to using hosted agents, where there are 60 minutes included in VSO, and then you have to pay for additional.

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Sep 092014
 

To avoid having the same Nuget packages in a development project, when the project consists of multiple Visual Studio solutions (.sln files), it is possible to configure Nuget to use a shared repository.

This is done by changing the default packages path to something else.

For existing solutions and projects depending on packages in the default path, the hintpath in the C# projects files (.csproj) needs to be changed to point to the new packages folder.

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May 272014
 

In my last two posts, I described installing the Microsoft Monitoring Agent and how to enable Visual Studio Application Insights for a web application.

It seems like a lot of work, and as yet you haven’t seen what you gain by installing the agent on your web server and adding a strange configuration file to your web application. You might wonder why you should do all of that.

This is why:

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May 272014
 

In my last blog post, I talked about installing the Visual Studio Application Insights monitoring agent.

That’s all very nice. But you don’t actually gain much by just installing the agent. You need to tell it what to monitor. This post describes how to do that.

If you have web applications running in IIS, and you want to monitor their performance, you are pretty much all set by simply installing the monitoring agent, and adding a single config file to your project. The config file ApplicationInsights.config lets the monitoring agent know that you want this web application monitored, and it allows you to configure some settings about what you want monitored.

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May 202014
 

Visual Studio Online has a relatively new feature called Application Insights. It’s currently in preview, but it already has lots of nice features for gaining insights into what is going on with your web app (or Windows Phone app or Azure web site).

I’m planning to do a few blog posts on this subject. This first part is about installing the monitoring agent and getting the first Application Insights information from my apps to the Application Insights portal.

In my current main project, we have a lot of WCF services hosted with my company’s hosting branch. We don’t have a lot of information about the service health and their use, other than what monitoring services we have built ourselves. Since that is not our main business, we decided to use a third-party service to monitor those things.

We have evaluated a few options, and decided to go further with VS Application Insights, as it seemed to be enough for our needs – and while we evaluate, its free. I guess it will come at a cost when it gets out of preview.

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Apr 022014
 

We have a .net library that communicates with a web service over a “REST-like” interface. To send data to the interface, we need to PUT or POST XML data.

The library is a few years old and uses the WCF REST implementation that existed before it became a part of the .net framework. It was called the WCF REST Starter Kit, and has since been superceeded by built-in classes, but it works, and we haven’t had the inclination or time to change code that works.

The communications library was originally used by a server-side Windows Service which was only used by a few users at a time, and its PUT or POST operations are rarely used.

Recently, we started to use the communication library in a new project where it is used in a multi-tenant server with many simultaneous users, and its PUT and POST operations are called much more often. This new usage made a memory leak much more significant than before.

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