Tech Tips

Problem After deploying a dotnet 6 console app to a production server, I got the following error: Exception: [Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data.Odbc, Version=6.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’. The system cannot find the file specified.] The strange thing was the same EXE, built on a Microsoft hosted Azure DevOps build agent, was working on the test server and was deployed using the same Azure DevOps Pipeline to both systems. I tried many things to work out what the problem was....

The Problem I recently did our regular update of our Azure DevOps Private build agents. It is rare we see problems when we do this, but this time one of our very regularly run builds started to fail when running unit tests. We had not changed the project source code, all the test ran locally in Visual Studio. We had not change the build pipeline YAML - task: VSTest@2 displayName: 'Unit Tests - Services' inputs: testAssemblyVer2: | **\*....

The Problem I have blogged previously about moving various web sites over to become Hugo Static Sites. Recently one of my site’s, one using the tailwindscss module, GitHub Build and Deployment Workflow started failing with the following error: Start building sites … hugo v0.108.0-a0d64a46e36dd2f503bfd5ba1a5807b900df231d+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=2022-12-06T13:37:56Z VendorInfo=gohugoio Error: Error building site: POSTCSS: failed to transform "css/style.css" (text/css): node:internal/errors:478 ErrorCaptureStackTrace(err); ^ SystemError [ERR_SYSTEM_ERROR]: A system error occurred: uv_os_homedir returned ENOENT (no such file or directory) at Object....

Background It is easy to create an Open Source Project and leave it to gather technical debt as the libraries it depends upon are updated. I have tried to keep on top of updating all my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions, and I have to say Dependabot has certainly helped, but I have not been as diligent as I might have been. So, as a Christmas project, I took the chance to start to do a major update of all my extensions....

The Problem I am getting back out in front of audiences again as opposed to doing Teams/Zoom events. So I dug out my trusty Logitech Spotlight presentation remote from the bag where it had been sitting for well over a year. However, there was a problem, it would not pair with my re-built Windows 11 PC. It could not even switch on. A quick search showed I was not alone in having this problem, the Logitech forums showed a lot of angry people....