Run Visual Studio as an administrator all the time

Why is it that right-clicking the Visual Studio icon and then clicking Visual studio opens the application as an administrator (after you configure it this way in the properties window) but right-clicking the Visual Studio icon and then clicking a project doesn't? In Windows 8 and 10 you have to follow a few more steps as defined here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9654833/how-to-run-visual-studio-as-administrator-by-default)

Right-click devenv.exe and select "Troubleshoot compatibility".

1. select "Troubleshoot program"
2. check "The program requires additional permissions" click "Next", click "Test the program..."
3. wait for the program to launch
4. click "Next"
5. select "Yes, save these settings for this program"
6. click "Close"

Entity Framework - Store update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows (0)

This error can have several causes, in my case it was that I had forgotten to create the PK and identity columns in a table. More complex causes can be found here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1836173/entity-framework-store-update-insert-or-delete-statement-affected-an-unexpec

PowerShell - "AuthorizationManager check failed" from Octopus Deploy

I came across this error when trying to run Import-Module in an Octopus Deploy PowerShell script. This script was in the source code. What I end up doing was taking out Import-Module into its own Octopus Deploy step "Run a Script".

This article also thoroughly explain the reason for the error http://tgnp.me/2011/09/powershell-authorizationmanager-check-failed-resolution/

In the process, I also learned that Octopus Deploy changes the execution policy of the Powershell process to unrestricted.

Tracking changes in a database in a .NET project

Java has a very neat package to do this, called torque. In .NET we're not quite there yet, so I highly recommend https://github.com/bilal-fazlani/tracker-enabled-dbcontext for .NET projects. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1) It will log all changes into only 2 (master-detail) tables (instead of having as many tables as entities as in torque).
2) You need to create those 2 tables manually, the schema is derived from screenshots in the wiki of the project (don't forget your PK's).
3) Setting it up is quite simple, only annotate the entities you want to track and inherit from TrackerContext instead of DbContext.

Debugging minified code in Chrome's Developer Tools

There are 2 options. The first one is really simple, just go to Developer Tools > Sources > Find the minified script > Click it to open it > Click the {} button on the bottom-left corner of the script. That is going to un-minify the script. In other words, it's going to add a carriage return to make it readable but will still be the same file contents.

The second option is to use the Workspace of the Developer Tools. You can read more about it here https://developers.google.com/web/tools/setup/setup-workflow?hl=en.

Version control for your database in a Java project

Flyway.

I highly recommend it. This is the technology used in the project I'm currently working on (https://flywaydb.org/).

Intellij vs Netbeans vs JRebel

After 6 months of using Java (2 of them with Netbeans and 4 of them with IntelliJ) in an enterprise application, I highly recommend IntelliJ if you want to improve your productivity (if your application is small then IntelliJ might not be necessary).

Netbeans offers a good start but once you're proficient, you find that deploying your enterprise application to review your changes just takes too long. IntelliJ offers hotswapping and yes, you can do hotswapping with Netbeans (https://github.com/dcevm/dcevm/releases) because hotswapping exists natively in Java, but sometimes it doesn't work. That's because you need to use a specific Java version. I had it configured and it worked ok but when I upgraded Java it stopped working.

With IntelliJ hotswapping is already built into the IDE. You don't need to do any configuration. Just keep in mind that with IntelliJ hotswapping doesn't work when you change a method signature.

Still, you can take it one step further with JRebel. However, JRebel gave me a lot of problems so I uninstalled it. My main issue was that the page would take forever to load after a few hotswaps.

In summary, I recommend using IntelliJ for your Java development.