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Dominic Burford - Professional Profile



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I am a professional software engineer and technical architect with over twenty years commercial development experience with a strong focus on the design and development of web and mobile applications.

I have experience of architecting scalable, distributed, high volume web applications that are accessible from multiple devices due to their responsive web design, including architecting enterprise service-oriented solutions. I have also developed enterprise mobile applications using Xamarin and Telerik Platform.

I have extensive experience using .NET, ASP.NET, Windows and Web Services, WCF, SQL Server, LINQ and other Microsoft technologies. I am also familiar with HTML, Bootstrap, Javascript (inc. JQuery and Node.js), CSS, XML, JSON, Apache Cordova, KendoUI and many other web and mobile related technologies.

I am enthusiastic about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Application Life-cycle Management having configured such environments using CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Team Foundation Services. I enjoy working in Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD) environments.

Outside of work I have two beautiful daughters. I am also an avid cyclist who enjoys reading, listening to music and travelling.

 

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GeneralWorking with Azure Blob Storage Pin
Dominic Burford27-Apr-17 2:29
professionalDominic Burford27-Apr-17 2:29 
GeneralWrestling with Apple Pin
Dominic Burford20-Apr-17 3:37
professionalDominic Burford20-Apr-17 3:37 
GeneralTwo unit tests, zero integration tests Pin
Dominic Burford10-Apr-17 22:39
professionalDominic Burford10-Apr-17 22:39 
GeneralThe Mediocre Mindset Pin
Dominic Burford29-Mar-17 1:10
professionalDominic Burford29-Mar-17 1:10 
GeneralHow much code coverage is enough? Pin
Dominic Burford21-Mar-17 5:14
professionalDominic Burford21-Mar-17 5:14 
GeneralThe Mythical Full Stack Developer Pin
Dominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18
professionalDominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18 
GeneralCreating your own private NuGet server Pin
Dominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36
professionalDominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36 
GeneralConsuming a dependency using NuGet Pin
Dominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05
professionalDominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05 
One of our .NET solutions recently needed to consume an assembly produced by one of our other solutions. So the output from one solution became an input into the other solution. At first I thought I'd simply add a build step to the Team Foundation Server 2015 (TFS2015) build that simply copied the file from one solution across to the other. But this didn't seem like a very good solution. For starters, the build would be copying a development version of the assembly which hadn't been properly tested (although the build had executed various unit tests against it). Also, this rather basic approach didn't allow any control over the version of the assembly that was consumed by the consuming solution.

A far better proposal was to use NuGet for this. After all, resolving dependencies in an structured manner is precisely what NuGet does. So I investigated how to achieve this. The basic process is for the donor solution to package and publish the assembly to a known location. The recipient solution then installs the assembly from this location.

So first off, I needed to add two additional build steps to the TFS2015 build process of the donor solution.

- NuGet Packager - creates the NuGet package from the specified project
- NuGet Publisher - publishes the NuGet package to the specified location (in my case I published the NuGet package to a network share)

This was the easy bit, and I got this working pretty quickly. After a few test builds I was happy that the donor build was publishing the NuGet package and versioning it to the specified location.

The second part was to add a build step to the recipient solution which would install the NuGet package from this location.

- NuGet Installer - installs the NuGet package into the location specified (the recipient solution's package folder).

This part proved to be a bit trickier as I wasn't sure what the correct way of doing this was. Do I create a single folder for all the NuGet packages? Or create a separate folder for each where the folder name contains the version number? I also wasn't sure what format the NuGet installer would be expecting. So I had to try various options, including changing the NuGet restore parameters, adding a NuGet.config file and updating the packages.config file. I opted to specify the NuGet source location and package directory as NuGet arguments on the NuGet Installer build step.

My NuGet arguments look something like this.
-verbosity detailed -source "\\network\share\nuget" -packagesdirectory "Solution\Main\packages"
After a certain amount of trial and error, and reading through the online documentation for NuGet, I eventually managed to get the assembly to install in the recipient build.

It's definitely worth spending the time to figure out how NuGet works, as it provides a very good solution for handling assembly dependencies between your various solutions. And of course, the TFS2015 build system has excellent support for NuGet, so it works seamlessly within the Microsoft development ecosystem.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare

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GeneralCoding Standards Pin
Dominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02
professionalDominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02 
GeneralSoftware Architecture Challenges Pin
Dominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31
professionalDominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31 
GeneralGetting the Most Out of Your Unit Tests Pin
Dominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21
professionalDominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21 
GeneralBuilding a strong development team Pin
Dominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31
professionalDominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31 
GeneralLast pieces of the mobile app in the Web API puzzle Pin
Dominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03
professionalDominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03 
GeneralSerializing .NET types that contain DateTime Pin
Dominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53
professionalDominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53 
GeneralClearing the Dead Letter Queue on an Azure Service Bus Queue Pin
Dominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57
professionalDominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57 
GeneralMigrating ASP.NET Web API services to the Azure platform Pin
Dominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45
professionalDominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45 
GeneralProcessing Azure Service Bus messages using an Azure Function Pin
Dominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10
professionalDominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10 
GeneralThe Structure of an Azure Service Bus message Pin
Dominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11
professionalDominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11 
GeneralMy Introduction into Service Bus Architecture Pin
Dominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40
professionalDominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40 
GeneralAdding resilience to your services by implementng a retry pattern Pin
Dominic Burford19-Dec-16 1:10
professionalDominic Burford19-Dec-16 1:10 
GeneralAuthenticating Web API services with JSON Web Token Pin
Dominic Burford13-Dec-16 2:26
professionalDominic Burford13-Dec-16 2:26 
GeneralDeploying to Azure with Team Foundation Server 2015 Pin
Dominic Burford9-Dec-16 2:29
professionalDominic Burford9-Dec-16 2:29 
GeneralCatch me over on Medium for my latest blog posts Pin
Dominic Burford7-Dec-16 1:15
professionalDominic Burford7-Dec-16 1:15 
GeneralWeb application metrics with Application Insight Pin
Dominic Burford25-Nov-16 10:03
professionalDominic Burford25-Nov-16 10:03 
GeneralHow to Pick Your Battles on a Software Team Pin
Dominic Burford16-Nov-16 2:33
professionalDominic Burford16-Nov-16 2:33 

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