NullifyNetwork

I just upgraded this site to .NET 6, I thought it was over due with the release of Visual Studio 2022 having happened a while ago now.  Great to see it was a quick and easy upgrade, the performance has improved even more on the new version too.  I just updated the build version, compiled, then fixed some warnings caused by RenderPartial, I'm pleased to see they sorted that deadlock!

I also took the time to switch to Alpine Linux as the docker container hosting it as it's my preferred Linux distribution, however found I needed to solve the ICU issue (the MS SQL Server client expecting to have localisation libraries) by getting the packages during the container build:-

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:6.0-alpine AS base
WORKDIR /app
EXPOSE 80
EXPOSE 443
RUN apk add --no-cache icu-libs
ENV DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=false

Oddly when building the ARM64 containers for the dev version of the site that runs on a pair of Raspberry PI's I also encountered a problem with the cross-compilation of docker containers, but that was easily fixed by running the below on the host building the containers as part of the pipeline:-

docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes

Happy new year to anyone still reading this, it has been more than 21 years I've written on this blog, varying from extensive articles to years where I've not felt the need to say anything at all (including last year!).  I just this week completely rebuilt this blog to run on .NET 5 and be hosted under Docker, no changes to paths, content, etc. but it's good to keep things current and modern and each rewrite I distill it further and make it simpler.

With the move to a more digital way of running businesses and all the working from home it's an interesting time for a technologist.  A decade ago this would have been possible but unlikely to be something we'd end up doing for real or such a prolonged period, now it suddenly normal.  It seemed appropriate to confirm all is well for anyone that still does look.

Life/work update: I've been managing a team of developers for the last few years now, I am still staying as technical as I can and run regular training sessions for my team.  I'm doing fairly well.