Looking to maintain virtual machine or Docker images in the most efficient way possible? Trying to build an image for GitHub ARC and needing to ensure you’re always using the latest available base image and runner? Then what you need is an Image Factory.

It’s not unusual for teams to want to merge the same branch into multiple branches. If they create multiple pull requests from that branch to each of the other branches, they suddenly find that their Checks behave differently than expected and the branches start to share results. Understanding why this happens makes it easy to get Checks to behave as expected.

What you don’t know can hurt you, especially when it comes to code. Dependency chains can tend to have more security considerations than most people realize. In fact, most dependencies have far more abilities than most developers realize …

I previously mentioned that it’s possible to force a release build to act like a debug build. To do this, we need to understand how .NET knows when to treat an assembly as a debug build or a release build (hint: it’s not the AssemblyConfiguration attribute!). We also need to understand the options that the runtime provides for overriding the default settings. Time to explore how that process is implemented and the configuration options available for overriding those settings.

A few weeks ago I went in for some simple tests as we tried to uncover the root cause of a sudden heartburn. With each test I took, we discovered that my condition was substantially worse than it seemed. I was running out of time quickly, and the doctors had to act fast.