Erik Lieben - Blog posts

Aug 11, 2025

TimeProvider in .NET8, the solution to flaky tests with DateTime.Now issues

If you're still using DateTime.Now in your .NET tests, you're building on quicksand. Flaky time-dependent tests are some of the most frustrating issues—they pass locally, fail randomly in CI/CD, and destroy confidence in your deployment pipeline. Good news, .NET 8 brings us TimeProvider to solve this problem. This isn't just another abstraction—it's Microsoft's answer to a problem and baked directly into the framework to make time-dependent code reliably testable.
6m read
Read more →
Aug 26, 2023

Using playwright during SPA/Angular development to mock your environment

Developing Single Page Applications SPAs can be complex, particularly when combining a SPA that communicates with one or more API's with complex data sets. It's often time-consuming to create a full range of testing projects that cover all the required scenarios in your testing environment due to complex dependencies or additional data structures necessary to make it work.
14m read
Read more →
Mar 6, 2023

Customized pull request status policy using Azure Functions for semantic release PR titles (part 1)

In my previous blog post/posts/semantic-release-nuget/, I showed you how to automate releases using pull request titles for your NuGet packages. When you use this process less often, or if you have new people onboarding your team, it is beneficial to give some additional help/ insights when they go through the process. This blog post will look at how to build an Azure Function to provide more information about the process during your regular pull request workflow.
11m read
Read more →
Dec 17, 2022

Automate your release flow of NuGet packages using Azure DevOps and Node's semantic-release

In the NodeJShttps://nodejs.org/en/ ecosystem, a great solution is available for automating the workflow of releasing packages, explicitly concerning the versioning of packages, named semantic-releasehttps://www.npmjs.com/package/semantic-release. All it takes for you to use this in your .NET project is a willingness to accept a little bit of JavaScript in your .NET deployment pipeline. A well worth exception you should be willing to take to improve your overall development experience. In this blog post, I will take you through my setup for a project that builds & publishes a NuGet package using Azure DevOpshttps://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/ to an Azure DevOps artifact feedhttps://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/artifacts/.
14m read
Read more →

TimeProvider in .NET8, the solution to flaky tests with DateTime.Now issues

Using playwright during SPA/Angular development to mock your environment

Customized pull request status policy using Azure Functions for semantic release PR titles (part 1)

Automate your release flow of NuGet packages using Azure DevOps and Node's semantic-release