Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Developer Tips, Tricks & Resources”
In the process of testing Retrace with .NET Core I decided to use the example MusicStore app as a test application. Pulling down the source from GitHub and deploying it to Azure App Services is easy right? Correct, and totally wrong both as it turns out. After hours of headaches… I figured I needed to share how I finally solved my …
In the first episode of DevCheats, CEO and Founder of Stackify, Matt Watson, demonstrates some tips, tricks and free tools to help write better SQL queries. Topics for Writing Better SQL Queries can be found at: 0:35 Using SQL Statistics 0:54 Finding high query reads 1:30 CPU time vs Elapsed Time 2:18 Execution Plans 2:45 Index Seek vs Index …
This month we’ve been talking a lot about tools we use for different phases of development. We even wrote a whole eMagazine dedicated to tools and interviewed six power devs to find out what they’re using to build better applications. Download that here if you haven’t. While tools for writing, troubleshooting and monitoring are critically important, we don’t spend …
At Stackify we have been doing a lot of work with .NET Core over the last few months. We ported StackifyLib and our logging appenders over. We have also made sure that our app performance tools, Prefix and Retrace, can be used to profile .NET Core based apps. In fact, we’ve even converted the entire codebase of Prefix to core so …
Naming things is hard—unless it’s a dog or a kid. That’s easy (apparently)! A brand or product name is a totally different kind of anxiety. Creating the product is comparatively easy. This is the story of the name that almost won, how it came to be, and how it continues to live exactly where it should—in the dark recesses of our code. …
.NET Core is here! We have been busy doing quite a bit of work with it. We have multiple client libraries for sending data to the Stackify API (for metrics, errors, logs, etc.). To ensure that all of our customers can send us data for their .NET Core apps, we have ported them over. So what’s the issue? How do you use …
Every morning I get up early, get on the highway and drive into work. There may be a little snag through the Grandview triangle (it’s kind of like KC’s version of the Bermuda Triangle), but it’s usually just a 20 minute drive if I leave at 7:00 a.m. After 7:30 a.m., that drive turns into an hour as fours times the commuters enter the triangle. …
There are many reasons why Partitioned Tables in SQL Server can be useful. In this post we’re going to focus on just one: deleting large quantities of rows from a tall and narrow SQL table without burninating your Log IO. Burninating your Log IO you say? Pssshh, Azure SQL can handle this if you work your TSQL like the late …
So, how do you show management that you are actually testing (you know, besides saying “It all look’s good, ship it”)? There are two tools we use a lot at Stackify: Jira Jira is a great tool for capturing work items and managing workflow from the Development and the QA teams. It helps ensure each release has the proper test …
A classic creational design pattern from the gang of four is the factory method pattern. Examples of this pattern typically involve a factory class that constructs objects of a different type. The objects that are created are usually implementations of an interface. This pattern provides a layer between consumption (the caller) and creation (the factory). An additional benefit is that the …
Stackify founder and ASP.NET performance expert Matt Watson shares his expertise around five common ASP.NET performance problems. Learn how to identify and fix these elusive problems in your own apps and immediately improve your app’s performance! Watch the video from last week’s webinar. The deck is available here: http://www.slideshare.net/mwatson81/5-hidden-performance-problems-for-aspnet
One of the best things about being a .NET developer is all the amazing development tools that can make your life easier. This blog post is a list of the various types of ASP.NET tools at your disposal for finding and optimizing ASP.NET performance problems. Depending on the task, some of these tools will be much better than the others. …
APM refers to application performance management or application performance monitoring and is an essential tool to help optimize and monitor the performance of your apps. You could argue that application performance management and application performance monitoring are the same things. Conversely, it could be argued that management infers being more proactive and monitoring only being reactive when it comes to the …
Imagine you moved to a house on a flood plain. Are you the type of person who would put up a flood defense system when you moved in? Or would you be out there with a armful of buckets once the rains came? Now picture the house as an application your company is working on. In many cases, people will …
At Stackify, we have about 1,000 SQL Azure databases. Monitoring, managing, and right sizing these databases creates a unique set of challenges. For security and scalability, each of our clients has their own database. As you can imagine, each client is in a different sizes and we have wildly different performance characteristics from one databases to another. We are excited …
How many combined log statements do your applications and infrastructure produce in a day? 50,000? Over a million? Here at Stackify, our applications generate around 100 million log entries every day. Even after feeding them into Stackify’s powerful log management and filtering tools, it can be difficult to distill things down into meaningful, actionable diagnostics with an incredibly high volume …
JSON is easy to work with and has become the standard data format for virtually everything. Although originally derived from the JavaScript scripting language, JSON is now a language-independent data format and code for parsing and generating JSON data is readily available in many programming languages. At Stackify, we use JSON extensively for REST APIs, serializing messages to queues, and …
We are very excited to release APM+ v2.2 today! We first released APM+ for ASP.NET in April and have been working tirelessly to make it the best APM product on the market for ASP.NET application performance management. We think today is that day! First off, special thanks to everyone has used the product to date and all of your wonderful …
Today at Stackify, we’re very proud to announce the launch of our new product, Retrace APM+. This first release specifically targets ASP.NET, but as the platform continues to grow, support will be added for other popular programming languages. More details will be announced later this year. Stackify Retrace builds on top of the great foundation of our current offering, known for great real-time …
Use this checklist to improve your software deployment process! Deploying software releases is a mixture of planning, testing, late hours, and celebratory beers. This software release checklist is intended to be a guide to help improve how your team achieves this complicated and sometimes hairy task. Part 1: Planning and Software Deployment Preparation  Collaboration Between Development and Operations It is …
