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So yesterday Visual Studio 2017 was released. Big news. Lots of cool stuff. As I write this I am watching the live stream of the 2 days-long launch event. If you want to learn about Python support in VS2017 though, you have to dig deeper and head over to the Python Engineering blog at Microsoft. As expected, the official release is actually coming out with no support for Python. It will come in a few months. Bummer. In the meanwhile however you can go and grab the (also newly released) Visual Studio Preview. This new kid on the block has the ability to be installed and used side-by-side with the official release and will be used - you guessed it - as an early preview of what’s coming next for Visual Studio. ...

So yesterday I pushed some code over to GitHub, then went off to work on a different project. A few seconds later I got an email from AppVeyor telling me that my CI build worker was reporting a failure. I was surprised as just ahead of the push I had tests all green in local. Turned out failure was on an equality assertion between two date values: As you can see the mismatch was precisely two hours. That always rings a Time Zone alarm bell in my head. I was under the assumption that since my time zone was correctly set in my account settings, the workers would pick it up. Well as it turns out, that is not the case as that setting is only used for notifications and NuGet feeds. The AppVeyor app worker runs on UTC by default. ...

So how do you install the awesome Python Development Tools on the latest Visual Studio 2017 RC? That might seem a stupid question considering that the Data Science and Python Development workload has been available with every Release Candidate so far. You simply select the workload during the installation and you’re done, right? Not quite. I found out the hard way this morning as I wanted to install VS 2017 RC3 on my development machine and, to my surprise, I could not find Python Development anywhere on the workloads window (which itself is a huge improvement over the VS 2015 install experience, by the way). Easy, I thought, they moved it to some secondary “optional workloads” tab, but a quick scan did not reveal any of that. ...

A new major release of the Eve REST API Framework is finally out with a number of cool new features (MongoDB Aggregations!), few fixes, and a couple of minor breaking changes. On the Eve blog you can find a detailed article about this important release. I am glad to report that the Eve-SQLAlchemy community extension, which allows SQL databases to serve as Eve backends, has seen a surge of activity around it. There is a new maintainer, Dominik Kellner, and a bunch of active contributors. Work is being done to align the extension with latest Eve release. If interested, please join the efforts there. Speaking of community extensions, only a few days ago Eve-Elastic version 2 has been released too. ...

Recently I had to build and deploy a private NuGet server. The official documentation is quite good, but I did hit some (admittedly small) hitches along the way, so I thought I might as well share the whole process. Hopefully this post will be helpful to the next guy or gal adventuring down the same path. If I don’t need to convince you on the usefulness and importance of packages in modern software development, then you can safely jump to The case for private NuGet feeds, and spare yourself some of my ramblings. ...

After a one year long development cycle I am proud to announce that version 1.0 of Cerberus, the data validation and transformation tool for Python, is finally out. A while ago I wrote an article on the new features and breaking changes that come with it, so please check it out carefully along with the changelog. I just wish to reiterate my gratitude towards all the contributors to the project. The ones who specifically worked on this awesome release, those who made it all possible, are: Matthew Ellison, Dominik Kellner, David Kirkendall, Damián Nohales, calve, Jonathan Huot, Roman Redkovich and of course the one and the only Frank Sachsenheim, whose role was pivotal to this release. ...

I just released a long overdue update to Eve.NET. This release marks a significant improvement over the previous one, which was more a prototype than a real package. New features are as follows: PostAsync() supports bulk inserts DeleteAsync() supports bulk deletes GetAsync() has a softDelete option to include soft-deleted documents with query results GetAsync() has a rawQuery option to pass raw Eve queries to the server BearerAuthenticator class adds support for Bearer Token authentication Several fixes made it into this release and, most importantly, I switched to portable Profile259 which offers support for the following platforms: Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, WinPhone 8.1, Windows 8, .NET 4.5+. Yes, that means no more support for .NET 4.0. See the changelog for details. ...

SimpleObjectCache is a very simple permanent, cross-platform, asynchronous key-value object cache for .NET. It comes with built-in SQLite 3 support. Alternative backends can be added by implementing the IObjectCache or IBulkObjectCache interfaces. How it works First, you need to set the ApplicatioName. This is also going to be the folder where your cache will reside. Depending on the host OS the location of this folder might be different. On Windows it would be something like C:\ProgramData\<ApplicationName>\SimpleObjectCache. ...

Released by the nice folks at Drud, EveGenie is a tool for making Eve schema generation easier. Eve’s schema definitions are full of features, but can take a good amount of time to create when dealing with lots of complex resources. From our experience, it’s often helpful to describe an endpoint in JSON before creating it as an Eve schema. This allows you to make quick decisions about the structure of your entities without spending time moving schema code around. This is where EveGenie comes in. ...

Quick note to let you all know that Eve v0.6.4 is out with a few significant updates. Thanks to James Stewart for contributing to this release. Work on v0.7, which will include MongoDB Aggregation Framework support (docs) and many other new features, continues steadily.