Working with Git and Visual Studio – Use Git Rebase inside Visual Studio

This blog post is part of in-depth blog series on the working with Git command line and Git in Visual Studio. You can find the previous blog post here. In previous blog post, we discussed how to use git rebase commands, the effects of same on the branching strategy and also rebasing on the same branch. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use git rebase inside Visual Studio.

Re-creating Problem Scenario

For starters, we have two branches named master and newQuickFix branch in Continue reading “Working with Git and Visual Studio – Use Git Rebase inside Visual Studio” →

Working with Git and Visual Studio – Use git rebase with git command line

This blog post is part of in-depth blog series on the working with Git command line and Git in Visual Studio. You can find the previous blog post here. In previous blog post, we discussed what is git rebase, how it is different from git merge and when to use the rebase command. In this blog post, we’ll follow that up by using git rebase commands at git command line and understand it further.

Re-creating Problem Scenario

For starters, we have two branches named master and newQuickFix branch in our

Continue reading “Working with Git and Visual Studio – Use git rebase with git command line” →

Understanding Git Rebase and when to use it

This blog post is part of in-depth blog series on the Git and Visual Studio. You can find the previous blog post here. In this blog post, we’ll understand what is git rebase, how it is different from git merge and when to use the rebase command. The git rebase command is one of those commands which can work magic for managing the future development of a product by simplifying git history but it can be disastrous if not used carefully. Essentially, git merge and git rebase do the same thing, i.e., bring the contents of two branches together. However both of these commands execute this change, in entirely different ways.  Continue reading “Understanding Git Rebase and when to use it” →

Swap master branch with another branch in Git

In git, branch is just a pointer to the one of the commits. So you can create and remove branches very easily. Most of the time, you can select commit of your choice and create a new branch from their and delete the one you do not need. However, sometime you create one branch out of master, intending to merge it to master but later everyone starts using the same and it becomes kind of master. We ran into this situation with one of the source code repository. So to get back on track, we needed to swap the contents of the both branches.  Continue reading “Swap master branch with another branch in Git” →

Apply / Update application settings for Azure App Service using PowerShell

Windows Azure App Service (Now an umbrella term for Azure Web App, Azure Api App, etc.) has a handy capability whereby developers can store key-value string pairs in Azure as part of the configuration information associated with a website.  At runtime, Windows Azure Web Sites automatically retrieves these values for you and makes them available to code running in your website.  Since the key-value pairs are stored behind the scenes in the Windows Azure Web Sites configuration store, the key-value pairs don’t need to be stored in the file content of your web application.  From a security perspective that is a nice side benefit since sensitive information such as Sql connection strings with passwords never show up as cleartext in a config file. However, sometimes, this can be a little too much for the Azure Admins to configure each setting over there. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to apply application settings using PowerShell.  Continue reading “Apply / Update application settings for Azure App Service using PowerShell” →

Backup / Restore Data to / from Azure Cosmos Database with Mongo DB API

Azure Cosmos Database (formerly known as Azure DocumentDB) is a PaaS offering from Microsoft Azure. As a document store, it falls into the same category as MongoDB, CouchDB or RethinkDB and other No SQL DBs and just like those, it handles documents in the JSON format.

Azure Cosmos DB automatically takes backups of all your data at regular intervals.  These automated backups are currently taken approximately every four hours and latest 2 backups are stored at all times. If the data is accidentally dropped or corrupted, you can contact Azure support within eight hours.

Now what happens if you figure out after 8 hours that your data is lost or if its corrupted in your development / staging environments or something accidentally went wrong with production while everyone was on holidays. Continue reading “Backup / Restore Data to / from Azure Cosmos Database with Mongo DB API” →

Protect source code and use code policies in VSTS

As part of best practices, your source code should always in working state so that it can be readily made available in case of the disaster. The easiest way of maintaining this is by making use of various branches for source code modification and merging only valid source code changes in the master branch. Also build and release process is often set on the master branch so that you can always deploy release from working source code. So it becomes further important to protect your master branch from unwanted changes. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to protect master branch from unwanted changes in VSTS by making use of both permissions and code policies.

Making use of Permissions to adjust Security

A project can have multiple source code repositories for different parts of the project. Continue reading “Protect source code and use code policies in VSTS” →