October 15, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
A little while back I posted a couple of pictures of my new desk setup using both a Windows Laptop (a 2019 Dell XPS) and a Macbook Pro (2016) along with two 4k displays. I'm also using a single Logitech Mouse and Keyboard combination to control both machines and quite a few people were asking about how this works. So I decided to write a quick review of my setup here to give a few more details that are hard to give in a Twitter conversation.
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October 12, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Ran into a problem with properly activating a WPF when launching from Explorer and indirectly trying to activate an already running instance 'from within itself'. It seems simple, but windows focus-stealing restrictions can cause problems with actually getting focus into an application window. Here's how.
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October 05, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Custom project templates can be extremely useful in quickly creating new projects especially for extensible applications. They're also great for creating specialized setups to make it quicker to hit the ground running. With the .NET SDK tooling new project templates are now easy to create and this post takes you through the process.
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September 16, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Retrieving images from the clipboard with WPF seems so simple, but once you get into it you'll find that there are lots of problems with reliable image retrieval that works for all images. In this post I talk about the different issues you're likely to run into and one hacky but flexible solution to better image support by selectively sniffing image formats and using different clipboard retrievals based on the image format.
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September 14, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
I recently got burned in an upgraded ASP.NET Core server application where a missing `await` statement caused wildly inconsistent and puzzling output failures. While a simple thing to avoid, once introduced it's possible to live with this error for some time before it manifests. In this post I show a scenario where a missing `await` was causing infrequent HTTP response errors, even though the client apparently receives a valid response.
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August 05, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Dotnet Tools offer a simple way to create, publish and consume what are essentially .NET Core applications that can be published and shared using the existing NuGet infrastructure for packaging and distribution. It's y quick and easy to build tools that you can share either publicly or privately. In this article I make a case for why you might use or build a Dotnet Tool and show how create, build, publish and consume Dotnet tools as well as showing some examples of useful tools I've build and published.
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July 28, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Filters are not new in CSS, but their often overlooked for providing some useful generic behaviors for things like hover styling or nice background effects. In this post I discuss how to use the brightness() filter to create a generic button hover behavior and also briefly discuss the newish `backdrop-filter` property.
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July 25, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
I still use Web Site projects frequently for purely static Web sites that don't require a proper build process where 'DevOps' of any kind is overkill. Invariably when using Web site projects though, I end up requiring that 1 or 2 files are excluded on publishing and every time I do I spent a while trying to find the information how to do that in the `.pubxml` file. Well no more - I'm writing it down this time.
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July 12, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
When building ASP.NET Core backends for SPA applications one thing that you have to worry about is how to handle client side routes that end up being fired against the server through external or reloaded links. While ASp.NET Core has built-in support for this if you build a generic Web server, you might need a little more control on how to handle the Fallback routing functionality. Here's how.
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July 10, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
In this short post I'll discuss a small Console helper class I've been using to make it easier and more consistent to use colors with the .NET Console command. The .NET Console support colors easily enough, but switching colors and resetting them can be a bit tedious, so these helpers make working with color a bit easier.
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June 26, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Apple doesn't exactly make it easy to use iOS devices on Windows and one complication is how you can cast your iOS device to a Windows screen. This is useful for presentations or screen captures that I often do and in the past i've gone through a number of shady tools that have come and gone. Recently ran into 5KPlayer which is a nice video player that as a bonus acts as an AirPlay server and makes short work of casting iOS content to Windows
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June 23, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Live Reload is now common for client side application development and it has become ubiquitous for Web development. But setting up Live Reload to work on a phone is not quite so obvious. In this post I'll walk you through what you need to do to get Live Reload to work on a mobile device for more productive on-device execution.
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June 12, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
If you're using the Static File Provider in ASP.NET Core you might need to add some additional extensions that are not handled by default. For example, if you host a Blazor site in your own application an additional mime mapping for `.dll` is required. Here how you can map extra extensions to the Static File middleware.
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May 28, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
WebSockets in ASP.NET Core are easy to use but due to the simple model it's easy to forget that socket requests are long lived and can linger for a long time in the background and that can cause problems when an application needs to shut down cleanly. Luckily there's an `IHostApplicationLifetime` interface available that allows hooking shutdown operations and that provides the necessary cancellation tokens to allow an WebSocket connection to be terminated in response to a shutdown event. This post shows how this works.
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May 25, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Ran into a weird issue today with AdSense in one of my older Web sites. I noticed that the site was not using the custom scrolling in containers that I've been using for years. Turns out Google's AdSense on this page is injecting some extra styling that changes the scroll behavior - and the way the entire page works. Here's what the problem is and how you can work around it.
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May 21, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
This is a Jekyll Test Post - no really: Points: Getting Started Working with Jekyll posts Updating the data Note there's a no good reason to ignore this content.
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May 19, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Struggled today with launching WSL from a Windows application to automate an external build process. Turns out this was a lot harder than it should have been due to some quirks on how the `wsl.exe` and `bash.exe` are registered by the Windows Sub System for Linux.
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May 04, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
I ran into an ugly problem today with an application where nested static constructors where not doing the expected thing - failing to provide a value when one should be available. It turns out the issue has to do with constructor calls nesting and the order in which auto-initialized values are assigned.
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April 13, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
On several of my machines I've found that the 'Sharing Tab' in Explore had gone missing and I've been unable to create a share through the Windows UI. Apparently some update or software installed mucked with my settings that created an explicit exclusion to disable this Shell Addin. In this post I describe how to fix this problem and then offer several solutions: Fixing the UI problem and maybe more usefully show how you can use Powershell to share a folder or drive instead of the Windows UI.
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April 06, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
The Windows Forms designer sometimes feels very dumb - one of those times is when dealing with nested properties on a control which by default is not displayed as an expandable property that you can just dig into. Instead you have to do a bit of busy work using a TypeConverter to make it possible to create an expandable property in the designer. Here's how.
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March 29, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
If you're creating middleware components you might need at some point to inject content in the existing HTTP output stream in ASP.NET Core. In this post I discuss how to intercept Response output by using a customized stream, modify the data and update the final output generated, effectively providing response filtering.
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March 13, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Sometimes in an application you need to take over the routing process with some custom processing that acts on an incoming URL and actually has to go to another URL. This can be a simple relinking task from old content to new, or it can be more complex where you access a specific URL on the public site that actually needs to be processed by another URL altogether.
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March 02, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Windows long has had problems making machines stay in Sleep mode. In this post I describe some of the problems and likely solution by using `powercfg.exe` to hunt down and disable devices that can wake the computer from sleep.
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February 26, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
In ASP.NET Core 3.x Microsoft introduced a new `IWebHostEnvironment` to replace the obsoleted `IHostingEnvironment`. While that works for top level applications this can cause some complications for multi-targeted libraries that need to support both .NET Core 2.x and 3.x. This post describes the problems and offers a few workarounds.
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February 24, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
ASP.NET Core's default API handlers return an HTTP 204 response for null value results. This is meant to be a convenience feature, but if your calling API depends on a proper JSON response or an HTTP 200 result code, it can cause applications to break. In this post I'll describe why this can be a problem and how you can return proper JSON results for null values.
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