Recently I was doing some planning work for one of our larger repositories to determine how we might approach splitting it up, and wanted to start asking a lot of questions about the project dependencies within it. There are various great tools out there like NDepend to help analyze complexity and dependencies, but I found myself wanting to really query the data in a lot of different ways, as well as inject it with knowledge we…

In my previous post I started looking at how you can leverage Akka.NET's new Phobos product to start logging actor system metrics to Datadog. In this post I'm going to start taking that a little further by exploring the tracing functionality it offers as well. Similar to the metrics side, Phobos provides a flexible platform that supports a variety of tracing systems, such as Zipkin, Jaeger, Application Insights, and also the OpenTracing standard. I'm a…

If you're here on my blog, you're probably well aware that I'm a fan of both Akka.NET and Datadog, and observability in general. In fact, I even blogged last year about creating my own Datadog sink for Akka.Monitoring (which is still available on NuGet and we still use it in production every day!). This scratched some of my itches in terms of getting visibility into my actor systems, but it still fell a little…

Int32 ought to be enough for any table's identity column -- Most developers at some point We've all done it, creating a new table in SQL Server and giving it a nice auto-incrementing integer as the primary key. There's no way that table will ever reach 2,147,483,647 rows, right? Now, for most tables that's likely true, but the last thing you want is to be surprised when suddenly you can no longer insert…

Some months ago a feature landed in Xamarin.Forms that seemed to truly polarize the Xamarin.Forms community: support for styling applications using CSS. Some argued that it was an unnecessary introduction to "Web" technology to the native development experience, and others that it simply isn't the right solution to the problem. While I sympathize with the latter opinion and think there's plenty of room for some good debate on the right path forward,…