When developing a Windows service, you spend some time on install/uninstall cycles. To manage this, you use the command line tool “sc.exe”. Get Service Information Use PowerShell to get the current running/stopped status. You can use wildcards to get related service names. Start/Stop Service PowerShell provides commands to easily start and stop services. Install Service You can install… Read More »
Select use dynamic “enumerations” to hold values that are user defined and maintained in the database. A partial list of these classes is IBillCode, IState, and ITitleStatus. Below is a static helper to get a member value. Here is an example of how to use the helper. Note that you can pass either an order instance to the… Read More »
When creating Python code for Select, it is difficult to diagnose exactly what went wrong if there is any failure. The code below shows how to write messages to the System Event Viewer to help debug them. It is extremely important that it is removed from production code. If not, the increased CPU loading could greatly reduce the… Read More »
As all electrical engineers, I work with a large range of numbers for various components – from 22 pF capacitors (22* 1e-12) to 2 MΩ resistors (2* 1e+6). To make the work a little easier, we tend to use Engineering Notation. This ensures the SI prefixes are multiples of three. Just try quickly adding 4 deciFarad to 7… Read More »
I have a problem – I want to automatically generate a license file then embed the file in my C# assembly. This solution works by creating a new MSBuild targets file and embedding it in my project (csproj) file. Let’s start by modifying my project file. I imported the new MSBuild targets file near the bottom of my… Read More »
These are pipeline YAML snippets that I have found very handy. Print all Environmental Variables This is essential for debugging paths and composite variables. It generates an output similar to this. Notice that the environment variables are sorted and the trailing Format-Table with the -wrap parameter will ensure the values are not cut off at the end of… Read More »
There exists several types of variables that can be added to YAML scripts. I really like the Microsoft page that lays out a table that specifies the type of variable and when its value is computed and set. I have reproduced it below. The Azure documentation is listed in the Links section. Variable Naming Restrictions User-defined and environment… Read More »
I needed the ability to automatically build one of several possible build types for testing. I also wanted to just change one variable in the YAML to update the build type. This is an excellent use for pipeline “conditions”. Conditions can be used to enable a step, job, or stage. In this example, the user can select between… Read More »
This an an example of many of the environmental variables available to the build pipeline. The following YAML step… …created the following (excerpted) list. Variables are treated in different ways depending on the type it is and how it is references in the YAML file. See Azure Pipeline Variables article for more information.
The typical use case for my department is that when a build is triggered in Azure DevOps, we automatically load the single Git repository. Note that for these examples, the self repository is named ProductXYZ. the self repo is the one that triggered the build to occur because of an automatic trigger (someone committed changes to the repo)… Read More »