Category for posts on various tools
The dotnet command line interface (CLI) has been the recommended way to build, test, pack, publish, etc. .NET applications ever since its release. The big advantage is, that the tool is cross-platform and doesn’t depend on Visual Studio. One downside is, that when you run dotnet build on Windows, the dotnet command will use its […]
With the “old” project files, i.e. non-SDK projects, you could reference an assembly and it would automatically be looked up in the GAC (Global Assembly Cache). For SDK projects this was a deliberate breaking change with the reasoning, that the GAC is supposed to be used for runtime resolution and not build-time resolution. This also […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]