Starting multiple console applications at once from PowerShell

I know everyone is talking about Aspire for managing multiple running services while developing. But sometimes you just need something simpler and recently I needed a script to run two executables (.exe) at the same time. They are both running until closed, so simply chaining commands would mean that the second application would never start. …

How constraints can make your business better

Constraint is mostly associated with negative feelings. We don't like to be constrained. We want to be as free as we possibly can. But constraints are - to some degree - inevitable. At the very least, we are constrained by the laws of physics (good luck breaking free of that one). But most things we …

Validate response with JSON schema in Postman

Postman's test functionality can be used to validate that an API response conforms with a specific JSON schema. This is a great way to prevent accidental changes to the output, which could cause a lot of headache to the API consumers. I'm not going to go into details on how to generate JSON schemas. You …

How to build a Token Provider (with cache)

If you have a service, which calls another service, chances are that you need to retrieve and store a token for authentication. In this blog post we will take a look at an approach on how to handle this, with a single class. Let's start with the code (for those of you who just want …

Authentication with JWT in .NET 6

In this post we will look into authentication with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) in .NET 6. If you don't know what a JWT is, I strongly recommend you read this introduction first. It will make the rest of the post a lot easier to understand. First things first, create a new C# project of the …

The Agile Paradox

I bet you work at a company who’s doing Agile. But have you ever actually read the Manifesto for Agile Software Development? The first of the four key principles is this: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.The Manifesto for Agile Software Development Now why is this so important? That’s what’s today’s blog post/rant is …

Simple things – It’s not that simple

One of the most interesting words in software development (including no-code stuff, which I'm currently working on) is "Simple". The word itself seems really simple and hence we tend to use it without further thinking. But actually it's not that simple. Let's consider an example: A co-worker comes to you asking for a solution. They …

XPath – The path to better automation

XPath stands for XML Path Language (don’t ask me how, but luckily it’s not that important to this post). It’s a query like language made to easily navigate XML. Let’s look at a simple example. <book> <title>Agile Conversations</title> <author>Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Frederick</author> <price>19.95</price> </book> Then you can use XPath to select the ‘Author’ node …

Mind your own business (logic)

You might have have heard that you need to separate the business logic from the data access. Or sometimes from the domain model. But what does this mean and how does it translate to robotic process automation? There are always different ways to do things and as such you shouldn't think of this as "the …

Be concise

Before any of you start nitpicking, let me just say this right away: This blog post will not be concise. In fact only very few (if any) blog posts are actually concise. However, when it comes to code - which I want to talk about - being concise is incredibly important. You cannot add 20 …