I've been laid up in the hospital for a few days after a botched routine procedure. Guess those one in a million odds have to hit from time to time.
Think I'll avoid voluntary gambling, traveling to Vegas, or the like for awhile. 😅
Here's to hoping I'm discharged within the next couple days.
I just released SQL Project Power Tools 1.0. This free Visual Studio extension enhances the SQL Project developer experience for any database project type.I also published a "Getting Started" guide for anyone to start using the tool.
#sqlserver #database #visualstudio
I've been working on a lot of MSBuild tasks, targets, props, and SDKs lately, but hand-rolling XML and restating a lot of the same stuff all over the place has gotten to be annoying.
To remedy that, I built JD.MSBuild.Fluent. It's still in pretty early development, but it seems to do the trick.
I ended up building a whole MCP Manager to deal with the problem as well. github.com/jerrettdavis...
It's getting more feature packed by the day! Now supports reverse engineering a database into a SQL Project and splitting Models and Data Access across 2 separate projects.
I may have grown a little drunk with power.
Automatic EF Core models from a SQL Project, DACPAC, or database? Done.
Splitting models and data into separate projects? Easy.
Packaging it all as a drop-in, no-config project SDK? No problem.
New idea: Live DB → sqlproj → models. BRB.
After being fully remote for over 3 years, I traded in fully remote back for full in office in August of this year. I adored full remote, but the velocity, collaboration, and ability to quickly get answers by simply approaching folks and having watercolor conversations feels far more functional.
Repo + docs: github.com/JerrettDavis...
If you’ve ever shipped “just a small experiment” and it turned into a tangled mess, I’d love feedback (or horror stories).
Introducing ExperimentFramework: composable experiment trials with fluent setup + source generators that swap your SuT registrations in DI for a proxy. That proxy gives you an “infinite decorator” surface for routing, telemetry, fallbacks, etc.
Telling was losing. So I did the only responsible thing: built a framework instead of writing a doc.
I argued it’s cleaner to treat experiments as a first-class domain, not a pile of ad-hoc decorators scattered through app code. Core premise: subjects in a trial should be observed, not acted upon.
We were debating how to orchestrate production experiments. Requirement was boring (in a good way): runtime switch between implementations via feature flags so you can bail out fast when “the new thing” catches fire.
I'll have to look over dnx a bit more this evening. Thanks for the tip!
I think my next thing will be trying to bake the core dacpac reverse engineering logic right into a task, instead of needing a specific dotnet tool. That would make it pretty much a 1-step process.
And huge props to @erikej.bsky.social's wonderful Entity Framework Core Power Tools library! It's doing the real heavy lifting for all the dacpac to EF Core transformation.
In future revisions, I'll bake the direct DB reverse engineering feature my package as well.
This methodology provides a singular, version-controlled repository that functions as the definitive source of truth for all data access, migration, deployment, and containerization artifacts and considerations within a database-first paradigm, all without requiring boilerplate code.
With just a couple lines of config in your csproj, you can have your project automatically generate ready-to-use entity model partial classes, and the whole process is transparent and nearly fully configurable.
I recently discovered the world of custom build MSBuild targeting and tasks, and I stumbled across a fun application for it in my day job that I formalized into an open-source proof-of-concept: automatic source-generator-like .sqlproj to EF Core model generation. github.com/JerrettDavis...
After seeing a fair amount of flack misdirected at abstractions, I got the bug to write on the subject a bit.
Abstractions are all around us, and they're wonderful when wielded responsibly.
I've been enjoying writing behavior driven tests. Before ever writing a feature or hotfix, I get reproduction and accentance criteria, structure it into Gherkin syntax, and start building test suites that model and change with the problem domain rather than testing how the implement works.
I have two longtime friends—twin brothers from Hyderabad—who’d urged my wife and me to visit India for years. We finally went for their weddings a few weeks ago, and it was beautiful and fascinating. We had an amazing time and felt honored by how warmly people shared their culture and lives with us.
The last month has been a whirlwind.
We came back from a week in Chicago. I started a new job, and four days later my 3-year-old, 9,800-mile Ioniq 5 was T-boned.
We managed to get it repaired and replaced in that short time. Now we’re driving an Ioniq 5 N and a Dodge Charger Daytona.
I’ve been deep in testing land lately: unit, integration, e2e, TDD, BDD, and all the buzzwords.
Out of that obsession came TinyBDD, a tiny Gherkin-inspired fluent DSL that makes your .NET tests read like acceptance criteria.
Write tests that look like requirements but run like code.
Had to cheat a bit: dotnet build insists on an XML file, so dotnet build MyApp.slncs needs .slncs to be a minimal XML stub (or worse, everything wrapped in CDATA).
I hacked around it with a dotnet tool instead — slncs-build.
A coworker and I were talking about the new .NET .slnx files, and I joked that it’d be nice to have a .slncs format so we could stay entirely in C# and avoid another context switch.
Then I got curious how hard it’d be. Turns out… not very.
👉 github.com/JerrettDavis...
After 3.5+ years with an incredible company and colleagues, today was my last day. Leaving one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with was a hard call—but I’m stepping into a dev-centric role where I can do more of what I love. Excited for what’s next, and still a little grief-struck.
If you flash mainline VIAL, no, but there is a fork out there with the appropriate fixes and it maintains wireless/bt: github.com/daskygit/qmk...
I figured if I was going to keep tinkering with mechanical keyboards, it'd make sense to at least share a bit of what I'm doing and why.
Starting off with the keyboard that sucked me down into the rabbit hole: the Glorious GMMK 2 96%
As time goes on, old ideas often find new life. Many clever solutions from the past still have surprising, cross-disciplinary relevance today.
Sometimes, the biggest barrier to progress is simply someone in one field not being inspired by a solution from another.
Middleware is so incredibly handy! Once I got comfortable with the paradigm, I found myself leaning on libraries like Mediatr from @jimmybogard.com to make it possible to implement them everywhere.
Compartmentalize those cross-cutting concerns!
