Nappi Sight

“In practice, problems are delegated but the power to address them is not.” - Maslach & Leiter Building the Object Model You Want with Entity Framework How you can improve your SQL with code analysis in SQL Prompt A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm – This is a head scratcher. Macro trends in the tech industry Technology Radar Vol 17 Essential .NET - C# 7.0: Tuples Explained – “What many folks didn’t realize when it was first introduced is that the new C# 7.0 tuple all but replaces anonymous types—and provides additional functionality.” Editor's Note – Misprint – “Any IT manager can regale you with stories of undiagnosable printer failures, but even at the home-office level printing is an exercise in fail” .NET Standard - Demystifying .NET Core and .NET Standard Devops - Continuous Data Migration Using Visual Studio and TFS

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it” – Yuval Noah Harari Running in Circles:Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently – “People in our industry think they stopped doing waterfall and switched to agile. In reality they just switched to high-frequency waterfall.” Living on the Plateau -"I, for one, look forward to the end of the barnstorming era and the onset of the era of professional, and ethical craftsmanship. An era where we discard the detritus of the excesses of our youth, and settle upon a small complement of languages, platforms, and frameworks, with which to carry out the long work that is ahead of us." Upstart - The Engineer's Path: 2 Decisions That Define a Career Welcome to C# 7.1 Security - Securing Dat

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it” – Yuval Noah Harari Running in Circles:Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently – “People in our industry think they stopped doing waterfall and switched to agile. In reality they just switched to high-frequency waterfall.” Living on the Plateau -"I, for one, look forward to the end of the barnstorming era and the onset of the era of professional, and ethical craftsmanship. An era where we discard the detritus of the excesses of our youth, and settle upon a small complement of languages, platforms, and frameworks, with which to carry out the long work that is ahead of us." Upstart - The Engineer's Path: 2 Decisions That Define a Career Welcome to C# 7.1 Security - Securing Data and Apps from Unautho

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.” -Daniel Kahneman Want Better Health? Do What You Do Best Every Day Introducing API Analyzer What would a cross-platform .NET UI Framework look like? Exploring Avalonia Microsoft Code Analysis 2017 Knock out a quick win The bare minimum a distributed system developer should know about DNS The value of human, exploratory testing Entity Framework 6.2 Runtime Released Test Contra-variance

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom” – Isaac Asimov The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars From an internal Basecamp announcement re: pings/IMs – Suggestions for a more efficient way to IM. “ just an empty ‘Ping’. You had no idea why I was writing, so you had to respond with another empty whistle back.” An Absolute Beginner's Tutorial on Dependency Inversion Principle, Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Transactional replication to Azure SQL Database is now generally available Tools are not the Answer – “the reason that we are facing a software apocalypse, is that too many programmers think that schedule pressure makes it OK to do a half-assed job” Don’t Get Too Comfortable at That Desk Knock out a quick win

“Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.” Bill Clinton Your future cloud is hybrid, and so is Azure Remembering How We Should Manage Open Source – “Equifax is not an isolated case” Restoring Sanity to the Office Getting Started with Windows Containers Abstracting System Time in ASP.NET Applications Distributed Architecture: Microservices and Messaging | Visual Studio Live 2017 – A very skeptical view of microservices by Rocky Lohtka Is Your Door Really Always Open? -“Maybe it is. But I'd wager that your employees aren't exactly lining up to get in”

“Even where performance measures are instituted purely for purposes of information, they are probably interpreted as definitions of the important aspects of that job or activity and hence have important implications for the motivation of behavior" - Robert Austin Ignorance got a bad rap Here’s How Often You Should Get Up if You Sit All Day at Work The Little Mocker – a conversation around mocking 7 More Lesser-known Debugging Tactics for Visual Studio Inversion of Control with WCF and Unity Workaholics Aren’t Heroes – “Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. “ Introducing Azure confidential computing

"Think about how we can build platforms that lead developers to write great, high performance code such that developers just fall into doing the 'right thing'.. the pit of success " - Rico Mariani Signs you might be in survival mode Hack yourself first – how to go on the offence before online attackers do Don't mix test code with production code Just following orders Enough – “Enough is the opposite of hunger. The counter to paranoia. The antidote to anxiety” On Programmers Productivity Why we don't speak up at work Announcing SignalR for ASP.NET Core 2.0 Why you should care about serverless computing

"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up" - Fyodor Dostoevsk 5 Things Responsible for Your Poor Code Quality What’s an hour? – “Do you have 60 minutes? Or do you have 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 25 minutes, 5 minutes, and 5 minutes?” .NET Application Architecture – Application architecture guidance Data Driven: What Amazon's Jeff Bezos Taught Me About Running a Company Mistaking Encapsulation for Abstraction – “But, what are we really doing when we create an "abstraction" or when we "abstract"? Are we actually doing what we think we're doing? What do these terms actually mean, and are we using them correctly?” Integrating StructureMap with WCF “We only hire the best” – “There just aren’t that many “the best” to go around.” Your API versioning is wrong, which is why I decided to do it 3 different wrong ways What Your Workplace Wellness Programs Are Missing Interactive tutorials are part of ReSharper 2017.2 Getting St

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.” Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency "Welcome to the Moral Machine! A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars." Introducing the ASP.Net Async OutputCache Module – “Starting with the .NET Framework 4.6.2 release ” doh! “Eat, sleep, code, repeat” is such bullshit What is agile software architecture? Agile Software Teams, a Basketball Analogy Continuous Delivery for Databases: Microservices, Team Structures, and Conway’s Law You sitting down? Experts say it'll kill you Maximize Your Visual Studio Editor Window Space Fast Cutting Edge - ASP.NET Core for ASP.NET Developers

“One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple. When you make it vastly complicated — and only a few high priests in each department can pretend to understand it — what you’re going to find all too often is that those high priests don’t really understand it at all…. The system often goes out of control.” -Charlie Munger Give 40, Take 0 – “Companies protect a lot of things, yet many of them are guilty of one glaring omission. Too often, there’s something they leave wide open and vulnerable: their employees’ time.” Fire And Motion – “What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding” Data Driven: What Amazon's Jeff Bezos Taught Me About Running a Company When to Mock – Advice from Uncle Bob Worry is the most useless emotion – “Remind yourself that the present is real — the future isn’t.” Five Ways to Cultivate Gratitude at Work

“One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple. When you make it vastly complicated — and only a few high priests in each department can pretend to understand it — what you’re going to find all too often is that those high priests don’t really understand it at all…. The system often goes out of control.” -Charlie Munger Give 40, Take 0 – “Companies protect a lot of things, yet many of them are guilty of one glaring omission. Too often, there’s something they leave wide open and vulnerable: their employees’ time.” Fire And Motion – “What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding” Data Driven: What Amazon's Jeff Bezos Taught Me About Running a Company When to Mock – Advice from Uncle Bob Worry is the most useless emotion – “Remind yourself that the present is real — the future isn’t.” Five Ways to Cultivate Gratitude at Work Engineering Managers Should C

“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker What do you mean by “Event-Driven”? –Martin Fowler explores the different patterns with ‘events’ "Whatever it takes" – Jason Fried warns us about the dangers of a whatever it takes mentality Disruptive Testing One on One Meetings – Advice for good one-on-one meetings Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? How to destroy Programmer Productivity Design Tip #168 What’s in a Name? Kimbal Group design tips on the importance of naming Show me a business problem and I’ll do my best to avoid it Optimizing the Sustainable Pace – “Sustainable pace was Extreme Programming’s solution to the short-sightedness of over-working ourselves to meet a deadline…However, sustainable pace is defined individually” Why Great Managers Are So Rare – “Gallup's research reveals that about one in 10 people possess the talent to manage…Still, c

Here’s the first in three years . Clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague. — Decluttering the company [The Economist] Most "mad scientists" are actually just mad engineers The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development Design Tip #178 Tried and True Concepts for DW-BI Success –“My suggestion for ongoing success is to keep your eyes wide open and constantly focus on the basics – the fundamental blocking and tackling of data warehousing. Embrace these tried and true concepts that years of experience have revealed to b

I gave up on the windows phone.  I’ve been faithful to it since the beginning, but my lumia icon was getting long in the tooth, and there didn’t seem to be any new phones on the horizon.  I think the windows phone has the superior operating system, the live tiles UI and the deep linking of app pinning was great. The seamless integration with the windows desktop (outlook, cortana, groove, calendar) made things easy. But the lack of apps and the lack of new hardware and software upgrades finally led me to throw in the towel. I first experimented with an iPhone 7.  The iOS felt antiquated in comparison, but it had all the apps.  Those apps (outlook, cortana, groove, etc.) were usable, but afterthoughts on iOS.  I found the email, calendaring (keeping work separate from personal) frustrating.  It also lacked what seems like the most basic of features, one that the windows phone has always had. The ability to read and voice respond to text messages over bluetooth, a la cortana.  After a fe

This week my directv dish had to be re-aligned. Was unable to sync kids iPad mini Just Sing companion app with Just Sing on the Xbox, after countless attempts. The iPad mini is horrible slow lately, and AirPrint only successfully finds the printer and prints about 20% of the time. While publishing this post, my wifi adapter crapped out. Took uninstalling, re-installing several times and a few reboots to get it back.

I’m been introducing my kids to favorite movies and shows from my youth, and they’ve had some interesting reactions.  They weren’t given a choice about liking Star Wars, although the indoctrination didn’t work on my daughter. Nevertheless, here are some reviews: E.T. – Liked it Back to the Future – Really liked it. Gremlins – Liked it, but didn’t think it was scary enough. Jaws – loved it. Raider of the lost ark – really liked it. Aliens – it was ok, but long and dull. Big Trouble in Little China – it was ok. “I know, there’s a problem with your face” stuck. The Last Dragon – It was ok. The Black hole – Not great. long and dull. Ghostbusters – really liked it. The Princess Bride – really liked it. The Temple of Doom – really liked it. Ripping the heart out was memorable. Rocky – really liked them all.

This is a list of mostly drama series, otherwise I’d have to include Seinfeld.  Listed in rough priority order. Great shows: The Shield Game of Thrones Six Feet Under Deadwood Spartacus Kingdom Farscape Battlestar Galactica The Walking Dead Vikings True Detective (the first one) Sons of Anarchy Rome The Sopranos Justified Rescue Me Babylon 5 The Wire Good shows: Lost Firefly House of Cards The Last Kingdom Marco Polo Lights Out Luke Cage Westworld Boardwalk Empire True Blood Oz Eastbound and Down Generation Kill Mr. Robot Shows I managed to watch: Breaking Bad Jessica Jones Daredevil Band of Brothers Shows I couldn’t stick with: Hell on wheels Mad Men Dexter Nurse Jackie Homeland The White Queen Newsroom Curb Your Enthusiasm Orange is the new Black American Horror Story

The bluetooth mouse connected to my laptop continues to drop connectivity. Sometimes it goes for a weeks working fine, then spends a few days on the fritz. Its on the fritz the last few days, and this leads to complaints from other members of my household.

Today the Chrome browser stopped working on my Windows 10 desktop. Uninstalling and re-installing didn’t help. Just hangs as a black box on launch and never opens. 

Technology today is amazing, from smartphones you strap to your face to bring you VR, to drone deliveries, self-driving cars and digital assistants.  Despite the near ubiquity of sophisticated awe-inspiring devices and apps, I nevertheless encounter malfunctions, glitches and failures of technology at such a high rate that it often feels like it never works (when you need it to or expect it to).  Selective attention I figured I might start chronicling these failures and frustrations as they occur just to see what the anecdotal evidence suggests. Day one PauseCast On my way home from work, the podcast I was listening to on podcast lounge over bluetooth in my car froze.  Stopping and starting the podcast didn’t work. Nor did switching to a different podcast.  I had to switch to Audible and listen to an audiobook instead. GlitzoPlex Today my kids asked to watch a recently recorded home video.  No problem.  I fired up my Vizio SmartTv, selected the Plex app, and viola!  Nothing. P