Windows

Book Review: Docker on Windows: From 101 to Production

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Docker is a powerful container platform originally designed for Linux, but quickly became popular enough to receive native support on Windows. I first read Docker training material that took more of a Linux-first approach and loved what I saw. However my day-to-day work is still typically Microsoft/Azure stack so I was looking for a good book that takes on the nuances of working with Docker in a Windows or Azure environment.

I found Docker on Windows: From 101 to Production with Docker on Windows by Elton Stoneman to be really helpful for that purpose. This post is my quick review of the 1st edition.

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Quick Tip: Windows PowerShell execution policy handling for x64 and x86 processes

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Windows PowerShell’s execution policy is well known feature that helps prevent users from accidentally running malicious scripts. I hit an interesting situation recently where Get-ExecutionPolicy showed that I was allowed to run scripts, but in practice I still couldn’t execute scripts from a .NET application’s hosted runspace. What was the problem? The execution policy settings differed across x64 and x86 processes. Since this problem isn’t covered in the official documentation I figured it deserved a quick write-up.

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How to capture and debug .NET application crash dumps in Windows

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It is important for software engineers to understand how to analyze process dumps so that they can determine why their application is crashing or behaving unexpectedly. However, it can be hard to know where to start with the process. This post aims to be a starting point for a very common situation: debugging a crash dump for a .NET application running on Windows. A crashing application is easily detected in the Windows Event Log when the .NET Framework logs the error, “The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.”
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