Once your Visual Studio solution starts growing, it often ends up integrating some maybe less than standard ways to do something. For example you introduce some custom MSBuild steps, output multiple projects to the same directory, or have things like WiX projects in your solution. Understanding what is actually going on when you build the […]
Error Handling with MSBuild’s Exec Task
A good old fashioned RTFM would have probably saved me a bunch of time the other week, while playing around with MSBuild’s <Exec … /> task. In order for future me or anyone else randomly stumbling up on my blog, to not have to succumb to the same fate, let me share a few tips […]
Clean Reinstall of MySQL on Ubuntu
Recently, I came back to an existing WSL2 installation of MySQL, which unfortunately failed to start the mysql service (“MySQL has been frozen to prevent damage to your system.”). As I didn’t need any of the data, that I potentially used in the past, I decided to do a clean reinstallation of mysql-server, which turned […]
TIL: Git Commit Reordering
I’m a strong proponent for rebase workflows with Git – it just makes so much more sense to me, having the history be based on the latest changes, rather than interweaving the changes with back merges. Okay, but that’s a topic for another time, here’s what new thing I just found out about git rebase: […]
PATH Handling in GitHub Actions
While playing around with getting a specific version of MinGW to run within a GitHub Actions, I had to add the MinGW’s bin/ directory to the PATH environment variable. This isn’t as straight forward as it would be in a batch or PowerShell script, because each GitHub Actions step is executed in an isolated fashion, […]
SFML News – Week 28-52 (2023) & 1-17 (2024)
41 weeks in one SFML News? Well it certainly has been a while and I’ll be painting with big brushes here. SFML 2.6.1 As previously hinted at, we did end up releasing SFML 2.6.1 in November 2023 and have since then accumulated a few more tiny fixes, including just the other day a 13 years […]
Using OpenSSH Server on Windows
In the past whenever I had to manage a Windows Server, I used RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to connect to the server and manually click around to change the necessary settings. While working with Ansible to setup a Windows build agent, I realized that starting with Windows 10, Windows does ship with support for OpenSSH […]
Diagnosing VSTest Crashes
The other week I got to spend a few hours trying to figure out, why some of our tests would silently crash the VSTest test host with no error message, log statement, and no Windows event log entry. All I got was: The active test run was aborted. Reason: Test host process crashed This then […]
More Than the Bare Minimum
The internet has a lot advice on how to be a “10x engineer” meaning, how to be the most efficient (ten times more efficient!) and effective (ten times more effective!) developer (in the world!). In reality, it seems to me, that the bar for being an effective engineer is actually set quite low. I don’t […]
Material for MkDocs GitHub Sponsor Journey
In the previous posts, I’ve written about MkDocs and Material for MkDocs (Static Site Generation from Markdown with MkDocs & Publishing a Static Site to Cloudflare Pages), but only realized the other week, that this also aligns pretty well with my other post on funding of open source projects (FOSS and Funding), because Martin Donath, […]