If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you’ll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the final post in this series, we show how to ensure specs written using Corvus.SpecFlow.Extensions can run as part of your build pipeline.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you’ll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the fourth of this series of posts, we look at how configuration can be supplied from your tests to the functions apps being tested.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you’ll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the third of a series of posts, we look at using classes in the Corvus.SpecFlow.Extensions library to run functions apps via scenario and feature hooks.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you’ll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the second of a series of posts, we look at using step bindings provided by the Corvus.SpecFlow.Extensions library to run functions apps as part of your SpecFlow scenarios.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you’ll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the first of a series of posts, we look at some different approaches to testing your functions apps, and introduce the Corvus.SpecFlow.Extensions library.

We use Wardley Mapping as a technique to give us situational awareness in our technical decision making process. We’re sharing our Office 365 Templates for PowerPoint and Visio, so that you can make use of them too.

In our recent project with OceanMind we used #AzureFunctions to process marine vessel telemetry from around the world. This involved processing huge quantities of data in close to real time. We optimised our processing for a #serverless environment, the outcome of which being that the compute would cost less than £10 / month!

This post summarises some of the techniques we used, including some concrete examples of optimisations we made.

#bigdata #dataprocessing #dataanalysis #bigcompute

C# 7.2 introduce ref structs, a new kind of type (Span is a ref struct) designed to support certain high performance scenarios. There are constraints around their use, and when writing unit tests for our Ais.Net parser, this caused some challenges. This blog describes the technique we used to work around the constraints.

The application of scientific experimental process to software development leads to the development of fully-validated solutions. This approach provides you with confidence in designs and means that you can quickly identify ideas which are not worth pursuing.

At endjin we use the ideas of hypotheses and experimentation when designing any solution and this gives us full confidence in the designs we produce. In this post we outline the steps and advantages of using this approach.

Here is the second blog in a series around learning DAX and Power BI. This post focuses on row contexts, which are used when iterating over the rows of a table when, for example, evaluating a calculated column. Row contexts along with filter contexts underpin the basis of the DAX language. Once you understand this underlying theory it is purely a case of learning the syntax for the different operations which are built on top of it.

As part of my series on guidance for CTOs, I discuss using the Office of the CTO (OCTO) approach to management, its strengths and limitations.

Integrating Azure Analysis Services into custom applications doesn’t just mean read-only data querying. But if your application changes the underlying model, it will need to be re-processed before the changes take effect. This post describes how to use the REST API for Azure Analysis Services inside a custom .NET application to perform asynchronous model refreshes, meaning your applications can reliably and efficiently deal with model updates.

As part of our work with OceanMind, endjin wrote a high performance .NET AIS parser. AIS (Automatic Identification System) is how commercial ships report location information. This blog describes the parser, and the performance techniques it uses.

Here is the first in a series of blog posts around understanding DAX and Power BI. This post focuses on filter contexts. which are a central concept which is vital for being able to write effective and powerful DAX!

In this series Carmel walks through the main ideas and syntax surrounding the DAX language, and provides examples of using these over a dataset. DAX is an extremely powerful language. Using these techniques it is possible to build up complex reports which provide the insight you really need!

If you’ve worked with Power BI at all, you’ll have probably realised that there are numerous mediums through which you work with (potentially the “same”) data. Data types across these mediums can be called different things, but actually refer to the same thing. They can also (unsurprisingly) be called different things and actually mean different things. It’s useful to know what the corresponding data types are across these mediums, as you may need to, for example, convert queries from one format to another. This blog and containing report intend to clarify what the corresponding data types are across each of the separate mediums within Power BI.

There are hidden pitfalls with dependency injection, particularly when managing the lifetime of scoped components. What is safe? And are there other approaches we can take to managing scoped object lifetimes?

Being able to construct DAX queries dynamically in C# means the possibilities are endless in terms of integrating Azure Analysis Services queries into your custom applications, and with the code samples in this post, you have everything you need to get started.

Salaries. What a nightmare! Hardly anyone likes talking about money. Technical people don’t like talking about money. Even a lot of sales people don’t like talking about money. When a CTO comes into an organization (even a brand new start-up) one of the first things you need to sort out is the salary quagmire. In this article we look at the strategies and pitfalls of introducing open, capability-based pay levels for a product development team.

The theme of this year’s British Science Week (6 – 15 March 2020) is “Our Diverse Planet”. We’ll be getting involved by speaking to school children about the work we’ve been doing with Oxfordshire-based OceanMind (part of the Microsoft AI for Good programme) to help them combat illegal fishing, hopefully inspiring some of the next generation of data scientists!

Ian spent a big chunk of last year writing an update to his book, Programming C# 8.0. Books continue to be Ian’s preferred source of learning because nothing else offers the combination of depth, breadth, and coherence. His goal with Programming C# 8.0 (and its predecessors) was very clear: to write the book that he would want to read if he were learning C# today. It is Ian’s attempt to distil around 18 years of experience with C# (part of almost 30 years of work as a programmer) into a coherent, complete description of what you’ll need to know to be productive today in C#.