A Timer You Can Stop from an Email
A work-from-home swipe modelled as a state machine, a stop-from-email deep link, the estate's one deliberate IDOR guard that compares instead of overwrites, and a DbContext constructed by hand inside the action.
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Nagging by Timer — the Ten-Hour Swipe-Out Email
Every five minutes a function hunts for people still virtually swiped in past ten hours and emails them - magic node numbers, an at-most-once flag with a gap in it, and a local config file pointing straight at production.
Sticky Sessions, Wrong Cache
In-memory session behind three App Service instances with affinity disabled, two distributed caches configured at once, a 1000-second easy-testing timeout, and a Redis expiry that throws every December.
The Error Logger That Cannot Log
A 22-character job name, a 20-character column, and an error handler that has thrown on every attempt since the day it shipped - plus the four parallel logging systems that still could not catch it.
Every Intranet App Ends Up Exporting Excel
EPPlus export by reflection, attribute-ordered columns, six near-identical branches, a ten-byte corrupt-file catch, a ghost OpenXml reference, formula injection, and the licence change that caught a lot of teams off guard.
A Work Queue in a Table Named Tolerance
When one job needs another to redo work, it leaves a row - an action enum, a rewind date and a Done flag standing in for a message broker, plus the delete-and-replay proc that makes reruns possible.
A Report Builder Users Drag and Drop
Templates, columns, filters and group-bys stored in tables, a fluent WHERE/HAVING/ORDER builder that parameterises values but concatenates identifiers - self-service BI, second-order injection, and a handful of copy-paste bugs.
ModifiedBy Is a State Machine
Four magic strings in an audit column decide which rows the batch jobs may overwrite and which belong to humans - provenance, workflow state and inter-job protocol smuggled into a field meant for names.
The Multi-Result-Set Dream EF Core Wouldn't Grant
An entire stored-procedure framework built on an EF6 extension library, shipped inside an EF Core app, in a folder named Future - the anatomy of an abandoned migration and how to recognise one.
Gap-Filling Two Years of Attendance
The shift calculator writes one report row per employee per day since 2019, inventing blank rows for days nobody badged - a dense date spine built from sentinel values, at the price of one database round-trip per row.
Three Ways to Call a Stored Procedure
Reflection that builds EXEC statements, a table-valued function called by string interpolation, and a raw ADO.NET runner returning lists of lists - one codebase, three coexisting answers to the same question.
Guessing Your Shift with Manhattan Distance
Badge gates record when you arrived, not which shift you worked - so the platform infers it, scoring every candidate shift by L1 distance in time-of-day space and letting the smallest number win.
A DB-First Model in Code-First Clothing
A decimal surrogate key beside the natural key that does the work, scaffolded index cruft with a placeholder name, a DbSet of List of string, and lazy proxies in a projection minefield.
When a Cancelled Leave Rewrites Last Month
Leave records arrive late, change and get cancelled - so the sync reaches back into already-approved attendance rows and re-derives them, carefully stepping around human decisions and allowance money.
Resurrecting Html.Action in ASP.NET Core
MVC5 child actions were removed from ASP.NET Core, so this codebase re-implemented them - an ActionContext conjured mid-request, a MemoryStream response swap, and a .Result at the heart of 118 call sites.
A Watermark Made of Your Own Success Log
The leave sync resumes from wherever its own job log last said Success - one table serving as log, watermark and metrics store at once, with recursive pagination on top and an envelope check in exactly the wrong place.
Compiling Authorization Out of Debug Builds
Every controller wrapped its Authorize attribute in
Syncing the Org Chart at Midnight
A daily Azure Function mirrors the HR system's employee master into the attendance database - a field-by-field upsert, a clever delegation rule, a vestigial handshake, and the parse calls that can kill the whole run.
Logging In with CAS When Everyone Uses OAuth
A 2004-vintage SSO protocol wired into ASP.NET Core - ticket validation, roles derived from the database at login time, and single sign-out through a WordPress front door.
The Database Is the Message Bus
Five executables, zero queues - how an attendance platform coordinated a web app, three Azure Functions and a console job through one SQL database, and what that choice bought and cost. Part 1 of the series.
An Attendance Platform in ASP.NET Core
Badge gates, WFH timers and shift allowances - the shape of a seven-project intranet attendance platform, the onion it almost is, and the roadmap for fourteen more parts.