We live in a day and age in which we can choose a data-store that matches the characteristics of our apps and (micro) services. Lately we’ve been looking into Redis as a high performing store for last viewed items. In this blog I’ll look show how to create a POC with the redis-cli and then implement it using .NET Core. We’ll be using the sorted set structure.

I’ve been having some problems with the search feature of Windows 10. It suddenly stopped working. I don’t exactly know when or why, but it did not come back by turning the computer on and off again. Reinstalling Cortana worked for me.

What’s the buzz all about? Well, originally it started out as a small children’s game, but now and again I see it being used to detect weak developers in job interviews (I think there are better ways to do this). The assignment has a view nice properties. In this blog I would like to look at some implementations and discuss the pro’s and con’s of each implementation.

I love how we can use appsettings.json files to configure applications in the .NET Core platform. The JSON-format feels a lot less bloated than the old XML appSettings config I used to work with. In this blog I’ll explore how to load a dictionary-style settings class as an IOption. This can be very useful when working with dependency injection.

In ASP.NET Core we are used to have multiple appsettings.json files with settings that differ per environment. I want to do the same in a Console Application. This makes debugging the application easier.

When I work in a low-light environment I like to have fine-grained control over the brightness of my monitor. When I change the brightness using the special function keys on my keyboard, it changes in steps of 10%! That’s a lot. PowerShell to the rescue!

Today I discovered that generating XML with PowerShell isn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. I started off with a CSV that I had to convert to XML. Fortunately PowerShell is very good when it comes to CSV. It was the parsing of the object to XML-attributes that proved the most challenging part.

I can almost hear you thinking: “What super-weird problem are you trying to solve!?” Well… it is kind of an abstract one! Imagine you have a dictionary of objects and a separate list of keys in a certain order. Now suppose you want an ordered dictionary based on the list of keys.

Slack is fully awesome. At Wehkamp we use it for our internal communication and as a tool for our DevOps. The Slack API allows us to build even more advanced integrations. In this blog I’ll explore how to use the API to create powerful progress indicators by updating a Slack message.

To give teams a jump start we’ve created the bot-zero open source project. It solves some setup and development problems. In this blog I’ll show how to get up and running in minutes and I’ll explain some of the choices we’ve made.