In the not so distant past continuous integration (CI) hadn’t been a thing. Today, when you look into the open source world, GitHub Actions or similar offerings are ubiquitously used and that with good reason, one of which being that it’s free. GitHub Actions offer a good selection of OS images out-of-the-box, but sometimes you […]
Category: Tooling
Category for posts on various tools
Prevent MSBuild Execution While Loading a C# Project
MSBuild is a XML-based build system “scripting language” and is the basis of all C# project files, which means, that for an IDE (e.g. Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider) to “understand” your C# project structure, build options, and properties, it has to parse and process all the *.csproj, *.targets, and *.props XML files. The build […]
Microsoft 365 Subscription without Copilot?
In 2023 Microsoft announced Copilot, that is Microsoft version of an integrated AI chatbot, for Microsoft 365, commonly/formerly known as Microsoft Office. My clarifying statements alone would make for its own ranting post on Microsoft software package naming – oh wait, someone else already wrote that. Mid January Microsoft announced that Copilot will be included […]
Welcome Back Fiber7!
After nearly 10 years, I’m finally back on fiber and with my favorite internet provider Init7! At the end of 2022, a company in service of Swisscom installed fiber connections in the cellar of the building I’m living in. Getting any information on the timeline of the availability was however quite a frustrating journey. I […]
Analyze Build Time with MSBuild Log Viewer
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, […]
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 […]