The power of giving an AI agent access to OpenTelemetry data through Aspire MCP is simple: it gives the agent better input to analyze. Instead of reasoning only from source code, the agent can inspect the actual behavior of the running system. That makes its insights more reliable, resulting in more relevant and correct suggestions.

You don’t need a complex setup or endless prompt tricks to get value from AI in software development. I've experienced that a few practices like an AGENTS.md file, Agent Skills, and specifications can dramatically improve the speed, quality, and consistency of agents.

Using Damien Bowden's secure ASP.NET Core and Angular BFF template as a starting point, this post shows how to integrate Aspire to improve local development and prepare the application for containerized deployment.

To keep up with modern Angular, there's a new zoneless subpackage that helps you write component tests.

Taking a quick glance at the new features shipped in Angular Signal Forms. We'll cover provideSignalFormsConfig, focusBoundControl, the Submission API, and the formRoot directive, and why they are useful.

Did you know that you don't need to rebuild your solution to adopt Aspire? Instead, start small and improve over time. Let's take a look at how to integrate Aspire into your existing project with minimal changes, allowing for a gradual adoption of Aspire's features.

Snapshot testing Angular components in Vitest can be noisy. Learn how to clean up your snapshots with Angular-aware serializers to get reviewable DOM snapshots. This practice can also be applied to projects migrating from Jest to Vitest, ensuring consistent snapshots across test runners.

Preventing any naming conflicts in the OpenAPI documentation by ensuring that each schema name is uniquely identified by its full name.

HybridCache is a great caching solution but it doesn't sync in-memory caches across instances. Discover how FusionCache can help you achieve this (and much more) with its Backplane feature.

Entity Framework Core 10 enhances the global query filters feature, allowing you to define multiple filters per entity and selectively disable them by name. This powerful enhancement gives you fine-grained control over query filtering, perfect for implementing soft deletes.

Learn how to simplify authentication in Angular applications by leveraging secure, cookie-based authentication through a Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern. This approach eliminates the complexity of client-side token management while improving the security of your client-side code.

Recently, I discovered Kiota, a tool that generates API clients from OpenAPI specifications, and it has significantly simplified my testing process. In this blog post, I'll share how I use Kiota to create type-safe HTTP clients that are consumed within the integration tests for my ASP.NET Web API endpoints.

I jotted down some notes of my experiences and thoughts while refactoring an existing Angular form to use the new Signal Forms (experimental feature).

Learn how to make use of the new binding methods inputBinding, outputBinding, and twoWayBinding to set component properties in your Angular tests. This native integration provides better signal support and eliminates type assertions for output events.

A Backend for Frontend (BFF) typically communicates with downstream APIs on behalf of the user. In this post, we'll explore how to forward authenticated calls to a downstream API using YARP.

Learn how to implement a secure cookie-based authentication in a YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) Project that acts as the Backend for Frontend (BFF) architecture within a .NET Aspire solution. We also cover why we should prefer cookies over tokens for authentication (spoiler, it's security related).

If you're having troubles with setting up or running your test environment, then this blog post is for you. We will explore what TestContainers is, what problem it solves, and why you should consider using it within your testing strategy.

Why VS Code transitioned into my primary development environment. The combination of its extensibility, the different integrations, and GitHub Copilot's capabilities makes it an ideal choice for my modern full-stack development needs.

Let's see how to use WithExplicitStart to integrate (TypeScript) Playwright tests within Aspire's dashboard.

Using data annotations to validate incoming models in ASP.NET 10 Minimal APIs makes it easy to ensure that the model is valid before processing the request.

Playwright 🎭 has some AI sprinkles on top of it, and I wanted to explore them. This blog post uses the Playwright MCP server to help us write tests and uses the "copy as prompt" feature to help us solve failing tests.

This blog post is the first in a series of posts in which a YARP project is integrated within a .NET Aspire project, acting as a secure Backend for Frontend (BFF) for an Angular application.

What if I told you that after all this time, we've been writing Angular Component tests wrong? In this post I will show you the benefit of HttpTestingController to test Angular components that consume a backend API.

A detailed exploration of the process and insights gained while creating my first Azure function.

Use the github.copilot.chat.codeGeneration.useInstructionFiles setting in Visual Studio Code to automatically add instructions to the commit messages generated by GitHub Copilot.

Skip the Microsoft tenant selection screen during the sign-in process by setting the domain_hint query parameter.

Don't just replace observable streams with the `value()` signal of a resource, but also take advantage of its built-in additional properties to improve the user experience of your application.

Lessons learned from migrating Angular Testing Library to ESLint's flat config format in an NX workspace.

How to configure .NET Aspire to enable browser OpenTelemetry data from an Angular application.

Some guidelines on how to structure and secure your Angular application when it needs to be consumed by different user groups, e.g. by a public and a private portal. You have multiple options to choose from, but my favorite is using an Angular (or NX) workspace, in this blog post I'll explain why.

Help! My build randomly fails during the post install step of NX with exit code 135. In this post I'll show you how I solved this issue.

Obfuscating data is a common practice to protect sensitive information, such as Personally identifiable information (PII). In this post, I will go over some techniques on how to obfuscate data in SQL Server.

As you will see in this blog post, the "baked-in" Swashbuckle package is no longer a dependency in the ASP.NET 9 project template. Let's take a look at what this means for your API documentation and go through some options to render the OpenAPI document.

Taking a look (including examples) at the new LINQ methods that will be introduced in C# 13, as part of the .NET 9 release.

A deep-dive at the internals of Entity Framework to come up with a solution to make EF interpret your value types, in this particular case a strongly-typed ID (of the StronglyTypedId NuGet Package).

How to make use of the new StatusCodeSelector property to change the default HTTP response status code (500) of a Problem Details response, based on the thrown exception.

Enhance your Angular development experience by installing the extensions mentioned in this article. We'll also modify a couple of settings in Visual Studio Code to make it easier to work with.

I assumed to know how policy-based authorization works in .NET, but I was wrong. Let's cover the basics to get a better understanding of how to implement a policy, and what to look out for. I also share some tips and tricks that improve your authorization layer.

Because of the Vitest plugin provided by Analog it just takes a few steps and minutes to test your Angular components with Angular Testing Library.

A quick look at the new `on` API to write output tests more intuitively and without workarounds.

In this post, you learn how to set up Tailwind CSS in a Blazor application, how to optimize the development experience, and how to minify the CSS file in a production environment.

How to configure the provideAuth function from the Angular Auth OIDC Client library to load your OpenID configuration synchronously or asynchronously.

Version 18 of the angular-auth-oidc-client library adds Signal support to access the authenticated state and user data.

Learn how to consume feature flags from a .NET API (using Microsoft.FeatureManagement.AspNetCore) within an Angular application.

A step-by-step guide on how to add code coverage to your .NET project in Azure DevOps.

TLDR: If you're already using Angular Testing Library, you're in luck, because it's already prepared to handle the Signal properties.

Angular provides XSS security without an effort to your development process.

Signal Forms is a new way to create forms in Angular. It's built on top of the existing `NgModel` with a similar API to `ReactiveForms`, and uses signals to create a reactive and flexible form. The main goal is to make complex forms manageable.

When you think of Zod, you think of parsing and validation. But by leveraging some of Zod's lesser-known functionality we can do more than simply use it to parse objects, for example, to generate a dynamic and reusable table component.

Configuring an Angular standalone application to be flexible enough to be released in different environments.

Taking leverage of the decorator pattern to add extra behavior to existing an implementation. We first see how to do this manually, before taking a look at Scrutor to simplify this task.

How and why you should use a DelegatingHandler to extract common HTTP request behavior.

Learn how to add and configure your Angular application in a .NET Aspire Application Host.

Let's expore the new API's of Angular Testing Library (v14.5.0) to see how we can easily test deferrable views.

In this post, I'm showing how easy it is to enable the Observability features of Wolverine. This matters (a lot) because it gives us insights into the core of the application and its overall state.

Taking the next step to keep the architecture and the codebase simple with Wolverine. In this blog post, we'll take a look at the WolverineFx.HTTP package to make the interaction with HTTP requests easier.

Keep your codebase simple by introducing Wolverine. As you'll notice in this blog post, Wolverine helps to reduce complexity and brings a lot of functionality without the hassle and the noise.

Playwright v1.37 introduces a new `merge-reports` command. In this blog post we'll see how leverage this command to create a single test report from different sharded test reports. The result is one page containing all of your test results.

Keep your Minimal API route handlers clean and compact by implementing a reusable feature flag-based endpoint filter.

A quick reference to help the migration from Moq to NSubstitute.

Provide global Injection Tokens within the Angular TestBed once to keep your test setups simple and DRY.

In this post, we'll take a look at the newly introduced IExceptionHandler in ASP.NET Core 8. We'll implement an exception handler that translates exceptions into Problem Details using the Problem Details Service. The result is a standardized and better experience for your API consumers.

Some useful built-in Entity Framework features that I discovered along the way.

Recently the angular-auth-oidc-client library (v16) introduced new APIs to configure the library in a functional way. In this blog post, I'll show you how to use them.

In this post we'll create a custom Playwright matcher to validate the shape of the response body using the zod library. This way, we make sure that the contract between the front-end application and the API is valid.

Leverage the power of Minimal APIs to treat your endpoint as the application layer. This has several benefits, but I find the biggest one being the simplicity of it.

I find that Playwright offers a great testing experience, and the new UI mode makes it even better. In this blog post, we'll take a look at the UI mode and see how it improves the overall experience.

A summary of why and how you should refactor your HTTP clients to the typed HTTP client version in .NET.

Luckily there's a function called `forwardRef` to solve a circular dependency between two Angular Standalone Components. A use case for this is a recursive component that renders its parent component.

Concurrency in recurrent jobs can cause race condition issues. However, we can prevent such problems by queuing new jobs when the same job is still pending. This approach helps to manage the job execution and avoids issues that may arise when multiple instances of the same job are active at the same time. In this post we'll see how we can ensure that only one instance of the job is running at any given time, thus preventing conflicts and ensuring a reliable job execution.

Let's take a look at how shifting the auth responsibility from a front-end application to a Backend For Frontend (BFF) affects our Angular applications.

You probably already know the built-in retry mechanism for locators and matchers, but are you already familiar with the retry and polling APIs? Let's take a look at the different retry APIs that Playwright has to offer, and when to use them.

To improve the security of our Single Page Applications, let's ditch the access tokens in the browser and make the Backend for Frontend (BFF) responsible for the authentication process using the Authorization Code flow with PKCE. To achieve this, we'll use the Duende.BFF NuGet package and let it communicate with Auth0.

To save us some time in the process to verify that a file is correct, let's automate the actions to download a file and add it to the Playwright test report for easy access.

Entity Framework 8 brings a new feature allowing us to execute and return unmapped types from SQL select statements. In this blog post we'll take a quick look at how we can accomplish this, and why this is an important tool to have in your toolkit.

At some point in time you'll want to run a subset of your tests. Organizing your tests with Playwright test tags helps you to do this in a clean way. Using tags allows you to target specific tests in specific scenarios, and can help to scale your pipeline(s).

Playwright (v1.31) introduces a new feature to make the authentication process easier. This approach unifies the authentication flow with the rest of the test cases, and more importantly makes it possible to test with different user roles.

Standalone components give you a better foundation to build on, as your Angular component becomes less affected by its internals. It doesn't matter if the component has its own template, or if it's using child components. This makes your test cases less brittle than before with Angular Modules. To interact with the component we're still using the Angular Testing Library because it provides useful utilities to interact and query the component.

Using the Azure DevOps API to automatically add reviewers to an Azure DevOp Pull Request from within the CI pipeline.

Using zod's coerse method to easily access route and query parameters in Angular.

Let's migrate an Angular application using @NgModules to the standalone API. For this task, we use the automatic schematic that's available in Angular v15.2.0-next.2. We also take a look at the manual steps that are required to fully migrate the application to use the new functional APIs.

Take advantage of soft assertions in Playwright to improve your test experience and reduce the amount of time spent on fixing bugs. Soft assertions allow that multiple assertions can fail in a single test, rather than stopping the test execution after the first failure.

How to register the OpenTelemetry web packages to automatically create traces and send them to a backend. The result is a helpful dashboard containing insights about the Angular application.

Using DbFunctions is a method to use database-specific functions in your Entity Framework queries. They allow you to take advantage of features that are specific to a particular database provider, such as SQL Server and use them in your Entity Framework queries in a provider-agnostic way. As an example, let's use the SOUNDEX SQL function.

In most cases, I write tests for Angular components without using Test Harnesses, but finding the correct element(s) is not always straightforward. Here, Test Harnesses play a part in easily finding and interacting with those components that can't be queried. Using Test Harnesses is also a good practice into keeping your tests readable and resilient to changes.

Intercepting HTTP requests is a useful feature, let's take a look at how you can intercept an HTTP request with Playwright and discuss some of the possibilities.

A simple trick to increase your productivity and testing experience.

NgRx isn't what it used to be. Take advantage of the updated APIs to improve your code base. The result is a more maintainable code base that is easier to read and navigate.

Creating a pipeline to run TypeScript Playwright tests in Azure DevOps.

Testing your translation logic and localization with Playwright

How to disable githooks in an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline

Your Angular Interceptor might leak sensitive data to the outside world. Here's how to prevent that.

Before the application gets access to the location of the user, the user receives a prompt asking for permission to share their location. This is not different in Playwright tests. In this blog post, we see how to handle this prompt for your Playwright tests.

Did you know that you could quickly set up a mocked API with the use of zod-fixture and MSW?

Don't waste your energy and time by manually creating test fixtures, use zod-fixture to make this process a breeze.

Leverage the Playwright test.step function to divide your tests into logical steps. These steps create a well-organized summary in the Playwright report and have the benefit that tests become more readable and easier to maintain, especially when a failed test is displayed in the Playwright report.

Exploring the new `ExecuteDelete` and `ExecuteUpdate` methods that were introduced in Entity Framework.

Making the team aware of the Definition of Done each time a Pull Request is created.

Uploading files with Playwright is easy!

How to run your Playwright tests against your Azure Static Web App preview environment, which is build and deployed with the Azure/static-web-apps-deploy GitHub Action.

Taking a closer look at the capability of the new output caching middleware in .NET 7

Let's explore zod together and see it can be useful to create a safer enviroment by parsing HTTP response bodies.

A collection of tips for debugging .NET applications.

How to open your JetBrains IDEs that are installed via the JetBrains Toolbox directly from the command line.

Let's implement a naive feature flag, refactor the code with the .NET Feature Management API, and to top things off, the Azure Feature Management Feature is thrown into the mix to tweak the feature flags dynamically without having an impact on the users.

Learn how to specify the Node.js version for the Azure/static-web-apps-deploy GitHub action.

Using Tye to run your local development environment.

Utilizing a matrix within your GitHub workflow to create a "test shard matrix" is a major improvement to your CI. This practice can cut the time in half (or better) to run your Playwright test suite.

Continuous learning is an essential part of your career, let's take a look at how you can do your best to keep growing.

The Consolidate view is dead, long live `Directory.Packages.props`. Use the `Directory.Packages.props` file to define your NuGet package versions in a single file.

A hassle-free way to fetch data and render the current state of the HTTP request.

A snippet on how to remove a specific slice within the NgRx state object.

What advantages does OData bring and why should we use it?

Using the global setup feature from Playwright to authenticate a test user and reuse its authentication state throughout your test suite.

Angular directives allow us to extend components without changing their internal code. This is useful to bring a consistent UX to 3rd party components. The directive can be configured to always be applicable, or can be used in an opt-in or opt-out basis.

Setting up playwright and "writing" a first test only takes a few minutes!

Configure the Angular router to always have access to the parent route data from within the child route.

Tips to help improve the shape of an older Angular codebase.

Say no to brittle tests with SCAMs

Creating a better user experience with the hidden benefit of the hidden attribute.

Configuring a new Windows machine with ease for full-stack .NET and Angular development

Creating a wrapper around the Application Insights SDK to easily consume it in an Angular application

How write maintainable NgRx tests within an Angular application

Don't create a false sense of security by overusing type assertions, instead use type annotations and return types.

Some small changes that are needed to create application instances in Functional Tests for Minimal Web APIs

Keepings it simple with ASP.NET Endpoints and its dependency system

Challenging the status quo with some thoughts on the new .NET Minimal Web API to keep code simple

Some basic and more advanced examples of pattern matching in C#.

How to load data from different sources without blocking the UI

Prepare your (view)models before they reach the component to make them faster and easier to render.

A fix for "Response status code does not indicate success: 401 (Unauthorized)"

A snippet on how to configure your project to reduce its memory consumption when multiple services are hosted on one server.

Implementing custom cache middleware to prevent non-200 responses from being cached by a client

How I write my Angular Component Tests with the Angular Testing Library.

A model is always changing, but that shouldn't be the concern of your tests

A brief post on how to patch a part of an incoming HTTP response

Learn how to create a single workflow that runs on multiple environments with conditional steps

Minify images as a pre-commit step with Squoosh, husky, and lint-staged

A simple workaround to use environment variables in SvelteKit

One validator to rule them all

The things I looked up while learning the template-driven way

Adding a layer on top of the Angular Forms API to declare useful and readable form validators

A peculiar TypeScript error at compile time and how to solve it

Clean validation with MediatR, FluentValidation and the Problem Detail specification

Using SQL Bulk Copy to have a huge performance gain

Let's create a custom Angular preload strategy that loads all modules for the authenticated user

How to manage nested state with multiple NgRx entity adapters.

Lessons learned while refactoring a process to make a migration from one system to another system faster

Give auto-focus to form controls with just a few lines of code

Make your CI/CD pipeline smarter and only build (and release) what's modified to optimize a run

Tracking the cause of my first memory leak written in C# (that I know of)

Highlighting the functional and technical advantages by using rx-query

Utilize the NgRx Global Store cache to persist data before it's shown

How to convert your SQL Profiler template to an XEvent template.

How to use the SQL Server Profiler as a utility knife to get a better understanding of your system.

How I used the expand operator to create a retry functionality in rx-query.

A snippet on how to get a stacktrace when a .NET Api fails to start.

How does rxjs-for-await compare to other approaches when it comes to testing RxJS streams, and what I like about these tests.

Using MSW to mock your server in an Angular project

Time-consuming tasks that can be prevented with integration tests.

Keeping your Angular Testing Library tests maintainable by using its new features.

A snippet on how to poll a service by using a NgRx Effect.

Eliminate motivation as a factor to get things done, find your rhythm, and just (start to) do.

Some notes from my first experience with Deno while writing a minimal API server.

Prevent an accidental commit by using a linter.

From my experience dealing with query strings was harder than it should be. But with URLSearchParams and URL it's actually pretty easy to do!

Getting to know the internals of NgRx to make a local component store happen.

Creating sub-components comes with a cost. So what do I think of before creating a new component, because if a component passes the x lines of code isn't a valid reason.

How do the canActivate and canActivateChild guards work in Angular and how to these guards compare?

The most important pointers you need to know before migrating your TSLint rules to ESLint rules.

Do not reassign an Observable, instead wrap it in another Observable.

How to use functional testing to have confidence in the code you ship.

Let's explore how we can stop writing tests and at the same time be more confident in the code we write. We do this by using the new XState test package, in combination with Cypress and Testing Library.

If you don't watch out your C# application might suddenly perform badly. As a solution, we can limit the number of operations with a LINQ Join.

Having an accessible website is important. With the combination of Cypress and axe you can verify that your website is accessible, with only 2 extra lines of code.

Let's take a look at what a flagged enum is and when these can be handy

I keep being surprised by how reactive Svelte feels. In this article, we take a glance at the Svelte internals to see how Svelte accomplishes this. This is important if we want to use RxJS in Svelte.

Learn what we did to make our Angular application snappier.

A snippet on use destructuring to remove a property from an object in an immutable way.

Writing Svelte component tests with the Svelte Testing Library is simple. Let's take a look at the setup to get you started!

If you're using Angular, there's a good chance that you're using a component-based architecture. We can use this architecture to our advantage. Instead of creating one big print stylesheet with some selectors, which becomes unmanageable complex when you have to support multiple printable pages. We can move some of the layout back to the components.

The createAction creator function opened opportunities in the NgRx world. With it came two other creator functions, createReducer and createEffect. Let's take a look at what's so special about it and why it's important.

In this article, we'll iterate over an implementation to introduce multiple independent instances of a NgRx store slice. In an application, these instances can be represented by a tab-like interface. To come to a solution we'll use the Angular Router, NgRx Effects, and NgRx Router Store. We'll also see meta-reducers, helper reducer functions, and smart and dumb components.

A snippet on how to invoke multiple service calls within a single NgRx Effect.

The Angular Component pearl-lullaby (v9.0.0-rc.0) release introduces the second official @angular/component component, a Google Maps component. In this post, we take a look at getting started with the Google Maps component.

The new Angular Material release brings us a new CDK clipboard module to interact with the clipboard. In this post, we'll explore how to use the new Clipboard CDK by going over some examples.

By using a Cypress task it's possible to run code JavaScript code in Node.js. We can leverage this API to reseed a database with data we're in control of. Having control over the data allows us to write specific and isolated scenarios to run tests against.

The Angular Testing Library provides utility functions to interact with Angular components, in the same way as a user would. This brings more maintainability to our tests, gives us more confidence that our component does what it's supposed to do, and it improves the accessibility which is better for our users. All these benefits, plus you'll see that it's fun to write tests in this way.

A lot of Angular modules need to be imported with a static forRoot() function, via this function it allows us to configure the module. But sometimes we make the mistake to use the forRoot function more than once throughout an application. We might not notice it when this happens but often it is the cause of unexpected behavior, which is sadly hard to debug. In this post, we'll look into a solution.

Imagine having a form that you want to use at multiple places inside your application. The form will have the same layout but the validation will be different. In our case, this form is used in a procedure and in each step of the procedure the form gets more restrictive. Can you keep it DRY? We had this problem and came up with the following solution.

I discovered XState a year ago, I already had encountered state machines and statecharts before but I missed the point. Now a year further, I'm here to tell you that these are worth looking into and that XState is a the library to get you started. For me, the most important points to use XState or statecharts would be that it's declarative and explicit, it's hard to create invalid state. The nice extra's that you get with it, is the tooling around it and the portability across frameworks.

At first when I heard of css variables, I was a bit skeptical. Why would anyone use it if there are extension languages as scss, sass, less and stylus. After several years, I stated to notice more and more peoples using it, writing about it and talking about it. I was missing out on something... After a while of using it, I was hooked.

Writing and publishing a dev.to blog post directly within VSCode

An intro to code coverage, how to read it, and how to make use of it in your workflow.

In our quest to build a twelve-factor app where we build once and deploy to multiple environment we encountered some problems, but we managed to solve them. Read here how we did it.

I believe that to become a better engineer it all comes down to practice, practice and more practice. Especially when you just started your career. The problem is that when you're just getting started, there is much more to it than just writing lines of code.

At our company, we struggled with Angular Forms at the start. This is because we dived in head first, without talking about how we would want to use it throughout our projects. This post shows how we're currently using Angular Forms to be more productive.

It's easy to create metadata tags with Gridsome, I was so happy with it that I wanted to write this post 😃. There is also a page in the docs on how to create metadata tags, but let's translate the theory into a real world example.

Writing and refactoring FizzBuzz in NgRx with maintainability in mind

Using the power of TSLint in an unconventional way to create rxjs-operator-counter.

We’re going to take a look at how we can keep the state in sync when a user has multiple tabs open.

I’m taking you along in my journey towards a fully automated process for releasing a library! Using CircleCI and the semantic-release.

Essential tools for maximum accessibility

Drag and Drop is a new feature in the new Angular Material CDK. Let’s explore it together!

A dive into NgRx selectors

Follow me in this play-by-play guide and let's integrate Jest within your Angular project!

I think it's time you and I talk a bit about action creators. But before we get into action creators let's first start with actions.

You're probably only using ngrx/effects to handle the communication to an external source by triggering an effect with a NgRx action. But you can do more.

Let us explore which methods I'm using to test my NgRx selectors.

An adapter around dom-testing-library to provide lightweight utility functions to test Angular components.

A follow-up post of "Clean NgRx reducers using Immer". But this time we're using NGXS as our state management library.

Declutter your reducers with Immer

Often when working with a CRUD heavy application you find yourself or someone else asking the question, what should be done when multiple users are using the same screens at the same time.

Within 5 minutes you can automagically have your library upgraded when a user runs the ng update command.

How to create required input parameters

NgRx Selectors with Props

A quick look at state normalization.