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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
What a Hand-Rolled Intranet App Taught Me
The honest retrospective - copy-paste as a pattern, zero tests, PII in telemetry and what employee-monitoring data demands, destructive error handling, and the handful of decisions that genuinely earned their keep.
The Dependency Graveyard
AutoMapper referenced and never mapped, a ghost OpenXml import, a full-framework MVC5 reference in a Core app, Hangfire packages with no jobs, unconfigured Serilog sinks, and an unregistered middleware - what unused packages cost even when nothing calls them.
Email Templates Live in the Database
HTML templates seeded in OnModelCreating, a reflection mini-language that resolves hash-brace tokens against a model, a Gmail-versus-SMTP environment branch, Cc quietly added into To, and string.Format run over raw HTML.
Two Key Vault SDKs, One Password in Plain Sight
One class bridging the legacy ADAL KeyVaultClient and the modern SecretClient, three coexisting secret postures - managed identity, a service-principal password in config, a committed key file - and a migration frozen mid-flight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Compiling Authorization Out of Debug Builds
Every controller wrapped its Authorize attribute in
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.
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.