There was a time when C# didn't support generics. It was a dark time. Ragged bands of .NET developer roamed the harsh landscape, copy-pasting strongly typed list implementations to avoid the evils of primitive boxing operations. Forced to choose between loose typing and explicit casts at every turn, would-be developers of strongly-typed object models somehow managed to endure and ship (mostly…
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In most organizations, if there's a Product Owner, the dev team is generally subservient to it and charged with building whatever the Product Owner comes up with. That's not to say they aren't often "on the same team", but the flow of responsibility is usually the PO pushes new requirements and the developers respond to them. Sometimes this relationship, even if only implied, has ramifications for…
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When I create a new .NET (5) console application and run it in VS Code, I get output like the following: This is just a lot of noise that adds no value and I'd like to disable it so I can see the actual output of my program. Fortunately, there's a simple way to do this - just add a setting in your file: Here's the relevant setting if you just want to copy/paste it: That's it. Once this is done…
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I've heard about AutoHotKey before but never gotten round to installing it until recently. Basically I had a bunch of text (code) that I wanted to display in chunks as part of an upcoming Pluralsight course. I didn't want it to just all appear at once, but rather to show as if it were being typed. But actually typing frequently involves typos and backspaces and other distractions. I knew others…
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A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to use the git command line to sync a fork with its upstream branch. Now, you should need those instructions much less frequently, because GitHub has added support for it to its web application. You'll find it in the image below: Once you click on the 'Fetch Upstream' button, there's a dialog to confirm: Click the button and assuming no major…
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When it's time to build that big new system to replace the aging old one, consider Gall's Law and the benefit of frequent feedback and evolutionary development. Gall's Law states: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a…
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My blog is hosted on GitHub using GatsbyJS and Netlify. One nice thing about this setup is that I have complete control over my content, and it's all version controlled and backed up both on GitHub and on various machines where I've cloned the repo. Along with the text content, almost all of the images associated with my content are in the same repository. Sometimes they're hi-res screenshots…
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When you're writing unit tests for a method, it's a good idea to test various failure conditions ("sad paths") in addition to testing the expected, everything is working condition ("happy path"). In particular, if you have a method that may throw exceptions, especially if they're custom domain exceptions, you should be sure you're testing this behavior. Another common source of exceptions is guard…
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I've been using docker-compose quite a bit lately for a distributed app that includes 3 front end apps, 2 databases, RabbitMQ, and PaperCut (test email server). For the most part, this works great as a way to encapsulate all of these processes and run them in a containerized manner so that everything works together. But building this whole solution is pretty slow, by default. When you work with…
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I'm using the command line to run build scripts and other tasks more and more, especially now that .NET Core / .NET 5 has the CLI and things like and are in heavy use. When you're running a single command, like or it usually tells you about how long it took to run. But when you have a scripted build that involves multiple steps, it's often nice to be able to see how long the whole thing took…
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