The Long Walk

Records were first introduced into .Net in version 5(C# 9). The basic premise was that, whilst classes work well, for some very typical…

I’ve previously written about adding Entity Framework to an existing project. In this post, I’m going to cover specifically adding EF using…

If you’ve worked with Cosmos at any level of scale, you’ve probably come across this issue. A good starting point is this article on the…

In this post, I’m going to cover writing a Powershell script that interrogates Azure DevOps to return projects, repositories, and PRs by…

I’ve written about Kudu previously. Essentially, it allows you to access the deployed version of your app. Sometimes, this can help with…

I’ve recently been talking (and blogging) a lot about App Insights for Azure. One of the questions or topics that comes up when I speak…

After recently seeing a demo of .Net Aspire, I’ve been playing around with some basics and, I have to say, I’m really impressed. I’m not…

In this earlier post I cover creating alerts in App Insights and, previously, here I have covered adding custom metrics. In this post, I’m…

.Net compiles to (and always has compiled to) an intermediate language (IL). This isn’t machine code, and this gets interpreted when it…

In this post, I’ll cover setting up an alert, the types of alerts that can be configured, and some strategies around what it makes sense to…

I’ve recently been working on a little project to interact with Outlook calendars, and so I’ve started looking into the MS Graph API. If you…

In this post, I’ll cover some of the things that you can do with the System.IO.Compression namespace. We’ll discuss how you can use this…

In this earlier post I covered adding App Insights to a web application using Open Telemetry. Here, we’ll cover adding metrics to that same…

JSON is a very forgiving format for transmitting information. It’s rigid in its structure, but there are no rules in terms of the content…

Interceptors are a new feature in C# 12. They’re also an extremely interesting feature - they remind me a lot of Weavers. The idea there…

I’ve recently been playing with the Open Telemetry Client for .Net. In this post, I cover the basics of getting it running inside a .Net…

I don’t often post controversial opinions, but I’ve recently seen a fair few people espousing the “if you don’t deploy of a Friday then your…

I’ve recently been playing with Event Counters in .Net. These are basically a way to record a set of metrics against a given program. In…

In the UK, it’s been a bank holiday weekend, which means that I had a bit of time on my hands. I decided to revisit the idea of creating a…

If you want to analyse App Insights logs then it’s very easy to do via the UI. You can click around and get some really interesting stats…

In this post, I’m going to cover some slightly lesser known features of App Insights: Funnels, User Flows, and Workbooks. Funnels Using this…

In this post, I’m going to lay out the basis of version control when dealing with databases. Before starting, it’s worth pointing out that…

This post is basically a write up of an experiment. Not sure if you remember chemistry experiments from school - but they never really went…

I’ve recently been working on a little project to detect the location and state of service bus messages. One of the things that I needed to…

I’ve previously written about running tests from JMeter. However, until this week, I hadn’t realised that Postman could do something…

Recently, I’ve tried using Open AI to get some data, and it worked quite well; however, one of the issues was the time that it took. For a…

Like many people, I create a fair number of console apps. Most of the time, they’re two or three lines of code to test an idea out, but…

OpenAI is a well trodden blog and YouTube path - in this post, I’m going to cover the idea of using it to gather information. Let’s say…

I’ve been playing about with some little features of my new site. The specific feature that I was working on was the ability to show any…

My latest (and oldest) project is NoSearch - it’s a curated search engine - that is, it allows you to submit a site (a little like Hacker…

In this post, I’ll cover creating a filter for an Asp.Net drop down list. Let’s take the following list as an example: What we want to do…

One of the things that’s often overlooked when people talk about CI/CD is the database. In the .Net world, where I live, that’s because, in…

In this post, I want to discuss the Service / Repository Pattern - what it is, why it’s used, and why (IMHO) it can be over-used. What is…

I’ve recently been playing with Entity Framework again. When using EF in the past, I’ve always managed to keep the queries relatively…

Entity Framework has a few quirks which, if you’re used to using something like ADO.Net, may be a little confusing. One such quirk is its…

Like many places, at Magpie, we use a message broker to manage the communication between different parts of the system. The visualisation…

I’ve recently been presenting a talk at various groups and conferences; the subject of which is software architecture. The main gist of the…

One of the interesting challenges with Asp.Net MVC when you first start out, is getting the routing right. In this article, we’ll cover a…

Have you ever seen a tag line that says a piece of software has “Five Nines” of uptime? Have you ever thought about what that means…

Today (23rd November 2022), after applying a Windows update, I started a VM that I regularly run for development, and received this error…

One of the things that has always bothered me about using libraries like AutoFixture and Bogus is that the data they produce is random, and…

One of the problems that you can encounter (especially) when using the pub/sub model in Service Bus is the issue of noise. The problem…

One annoying little issue that you come across when dealing with batch sending for Azure Service Bus if that the total size of the batched…

When sending many messages (thousands or tens of thousands) you may find that you run into errors that you may not see while testing with…

When you start to experiment with very large messages, or very large quantities of messages, there are times when the default lock duration…

I’ve recently been playing around at the edges of Azure Service Bus. One of the things that occurred to me was that, for a large message…

This post in a continuation of this earlier post around serialising an image. Once you’re able to serialise an image, then you can transmit…

For another project that I’m working on, I needed to transfer an image as text. In fact, that’s actually quite an easy thing to do in .Net…

For anyone that follows this blog, you’ll notice that Azure Service Bus is one of my favourite topics. In this post, we’re going to see how…

In this, forth (and probably final) post on the subject of Unit Tests, we’re going to dive a little deeper into the subject of mocking. We…

I was recently introduced to the WireMock.Net package. This is a .Net implementation of WireMock. The basic idea where is that you can mock…

So far, in this series of posts on the basics of unit tests, we’ve spoken about concepts and methodologies, but we’ve steered away from…

This forms the second in a short series of posts on unit tests. You can find the first post in this series here. In this post, I’ll be…

I’m intending this to be the first of a series on Unit Testing. In the series, I’ll discuss the basics of unit tests, the principles behind…

Cyclomatic complexity is one of those terms that makes you think you missed something when you were learning programming. However, the…

As part of a project that I’m working on, I’ve been playing around with integration tests. In this post, I’m going to combine this previous…

One of the tricks I’ve used for a while when setting EF up in a project, is to use inheritance in order to share code, but not objects…

I’ve previously spoken and written quite extensively about the pub/sub pattern using message brokers such as GCP and Azure. I’ve also…

I’ve recently been playing around with a tool called Scrutor. I’m using this in a project and it’s working really well; however, I came…

I’ve previously written about the Scrutor library. However, this post covers something that has long irritated me about using an IoC…

I’ve previously written about some Unusual things to do with a Console Application, including creating a game in a console application. This…

I recently came across a very cool library, thanks to this video by Nick Chapsas. The library is Scrutor. In this post, I’m going to run…

Some time ago, I investigated the concept of chaos engineering. The principle behind Chaos Engineering is a very simply one: since your…

Azure Application Monitoring allows for a lot more functionality than just Application Insights. In this post, I’m going to walk through…

I’ve recently been investigating Azure Automation RunBooks. Essentially, this gives you a way to execute some code (currently Powershell or…

I’ve been playing around with delegates recently, and came across something that was new to me. Whilst I was familiar with the concept of…

While playing around with MySql recently, I discovered a strange little quirk. An automatically incremented field cannot be reset - that is…

A few weeks ago, I was looking into making a change to a project in work that uses DbUp. For some reason, I took away from that the…

In recent investigations into Terraform, I came across a situation where I’d created a resource not known to Terraform, but which I now…

I’ve recently been revisiting and revising an old talk on Service Bus. One of the things that I’m updating is the Azure SDK library. In…

Some time ago, I wrote about how you can read the dead letter queue. I also wrote this post on the evolution of Azure Service Bus libraries…

I’ve recently been working with Azure Isolated Functions for .Net 6. This is a kind of getting started guide - especially if you’re coming…

Some time ago, while trying to get .Net Core 3.1 to work with Xunit, I discovered that 2.4.1 was the correct library to use for xunit.runner…

This is a really strange post, but it’s a line up for a different post; however, I felt it made sense to be a post in its own right - it…

In this earlier post I wrote about how you might set-up hangfire in .Net 6 using Lite Storage. In this post, we’ll talk about the Hangfire…

I’ve recently being wrestling with trying to get an ASP.Net service within a docker container to call a service running outside of that…

In this post (part of a series around docker basics) I’ll be disucssing how you can view logs for running docker containers. As usual with…

In this post, I introduced the DevOps CLI. Here, I’m going to expand on that by interrogating the DevOps API, and generating a new work…

I’ve been playing a little with Azure DevOps recently, and one thing that I hadn’t realised, but found interesting, was the CLI. If you use…

I’ve recently been doing a fair bit of investigation into docker. My latest post was investigating the idea of setting up a sidercar…

While trying to set-up a docker image for a .Net 6 console application, I found that, although it built fine, I got the an error when trying…

Minimal Apis in .Net 6 are really an absolutely amazing feature - you can create an API in about 5 or 6 lines of code. If you have a look…

I’ve written a fair few articles on using console apps, especially for the purpose of writing games. This post, for example, is the start…

One of the things that I’ve been looking into recently is Hangfire. I’ve used this in the past, but not for a while, and so I wanted to get…

A sidecar pattern essentially allows a running process to communicate with a separate process (or sidecar) in order to offload some non…

In this post I starting a series on getting started with Docker; here, I’m going to expand to give some tips on how to debug a docker build…

I’ve recently been creating a JetSet Willy clone in Blazor. I use the term clone loosely - I’m actually not creating a clone or anything…

In this post I started writing a game in Blazor. In this last post, I covered how we could use the keyboard to move an object around, and…

Ever watched 24, The Blacklist, War Games, or basically anything where a computer, or technology is being used? You’ll know these…

In this post I started the process of writing a very vague approximation of Jet Set Willy, in an effort to regain my youth. Here, we’re…

By now, writing games in frameworks that were clearly not designed for such things is becoming something of a habit for me. Here I created a…

In this post from 2016 I gave some details as to how you could manually parse a JSON string using Newtonsoft JSON.NET. What I don’t think I…

I started investigating this for a unit test. I wanted to compile a separate project, and then copy the output into the test directory. As…

In this post I covered the very basics of getting started with Docker. Once you start to experiment, you’ll need to learn how to debug and…

Disclaimer - This is pretty much my first time playing around with Python - there’s a good chance that what I’m doing here is wrong. All I…

Managing databases is difficult - it’s difficult because the changes to them are different than software changes; for example, if I have a…

Pretty much the only end-to-end automation tool that I’ve used to date has been Selenium. I heard about Playwright in passing, and thought…

In this previous post I showed how you can set-up a custom domain in Azure and link that to your app service. Here, I’ll cover how you can…

I’ve recently been playing around with Cloudflare workers. As part of this, I wanted to experiment using them against an Azure App Service…

Some time ago, I heard Dan Clarke from the Unhandled Exception podcast mention Mutation testing - the latest episode on this can be found…

I’ve recently been learning and blogging about Terraform (the latest of which you can find here). In this post, I’m going to cover the…

Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus is the latest SDK library that allows you to interface with Azure Service Bus. In this post I wrote about…

In my recent experiments with using MongoDB, I came across a need to remove all the records from a collection - the equivalent of DELETE…

I’ve written pretty extensively on the Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus SDK. In this post, I’m just covering the fact that this library is on its…

Imagine a situation where your web-site is being linked to, or referenced, such that the case of the URL differs; or, for example, where you…

I thought I’d detail some things that you can do when you get issues with git. Specifically, how you can deal with issues without having to…

In my recent posts I’ve been trying to learn a little about MongoDB, and the API. Whilst trying to insert data into a MongoDB database, I…

In this previous post I wrote about how you can install MongoDB, and use the built in clients to interrogate the data. In this post I’ll…

I’m relatively new to Mongo, but I’ve decided to use it for a recent project, mainly because it writes quickly. I wanted to install and run…

I’ve recently been writing about Terraform - mainly because I’m learning it from scratch, and playing about with tech and then writing about…

Although I’ve used React before, Gatsby was quite new to me. This post was born from the creation of this website. We needed something…

Following on from my introductory posts around Terraform, in this post, I’m going to create an Azure Storage account and blob container…

In my previous post on Getting started with Terraform I covered a very quick, and vague explanation of what Terraform is, and what it does…

In this post, I’m going to download Terraform and create a resource group, and then change the location of that resource group. Most of…

Azure Service Bus is often used as a way to link services (as the name suggests). This typically means that the throughput is large, but…

In the past few months, I’ve written, and spoken quite a lot about Azure Service Bus - especially the new features that are now available…

In preparation for a talk I’m giving, I started looking into ways that you can create Azure Service Bus queues programatically (If you want…

It’s been a while since I looked at CosmosDB (there is a chapter in my book - to the right of your screen - that covers some details of…

In this, the fifth and final instalment of my series on creating a game using VueJS, we’re going to improve the gameplay a little, and we’re…

Some time ago, I saw a talk at DDD North about git bisect (it may well have been this one). I blogged about it here. I can honestly say…

In Azure Service Bus, you can schedule a message to deliver at a later time, but you can also defer a message until a later time. Scheduled…

This post follows on from a series on creating a game in Vue. If you’d like to start from the beginning, then go here. In the previous post…

I’ve recently been giving talks on Azure Service Bus, and one of the things that became annoying was how difficult it was to launch new…

This is the third part in a series on replicating a game similar (in some respects) to the ZX Spectrum game “Daley Thompson’s Decathlon”. To…

This is the second post in a series that started here. If you’d like some context, then please visit the first post. In this post, I’ll be…

I’ve been writing about and speaking about Azure Service Bus a lot recently. In this post, I’m going to focus on the Dead Letter Queue in…

If, like me, you’re over the age of 35, you may have owned a Spectrum, Amstrad, or Commodore 64. One of the games, especially on the…

I’ve recently been playing around with Vue. One of the things that I typically do when I’m learning some kind of front-end technology, is…

In Asp.Net Core, you can view a list of data known as Server Variables. These are available when hosting inside IIS, and they give…

Azure Service Bus sets itself apart from other message brokers by the dizzying array of additional and useful features that it provides out…

I’ve recently been playing with WSL2, and one of the things that quickly bites you, is trying to move between your Linux distribution, and…

In this post I covered the basics of setting up a queue and sending a message to it. Here, I’m going to cover the options around receiving…

In Asp.Net Core server-side rendered HTML, you have the ability to use something called Partial Views. Essentially, these give you the…

One of the things that’s always irked me about Azure KeyVault is that, whilst it may indeed be a super secure store of information…

While playing around with Azure Service Bus in .Net Core, I came across this error, and it had me stumped for a while: Microsoft.Azure…

This is another of those blog posts that’s probably been done before, but I keep having to collate a few pieces of information. What we’re…

While writing an Azure function, I established a simple repository pattern using the standard IoC for Functions. However, when I ran the…

I’ve recently been playing around with ML.NET. I’ve documented some of my escapades here. One thing that I found was that, when trying to…

Have you ever wondered why milk is where it is in the supermarket? At least in the UK, the supermarkets sell milk either at cost, or even…

Postman is a really great tool, but I’ve recently been playing with Telerik’s new version of Fiddler - Fiddler Everywhere. You’re probably…

I recently had an issue where I was trying to use a tag helper that wasn’t correctly rendering. The HTML that I had (which was trying to…

I’ve recently been investigating the prospect of creating a web-site, where an animation (admittedly a cheesy one) is played out when you…

I’ve done this a few times, and have failed to document it, and so each time it’s a pain. To be clear, if you’re downloading from FTP, you…

Entity Framework Core is primarily concerned with defining and executing pre-defined queries on a DB table, or executing a simple join on…

I recently came across an issue whereby an Asp.Net Core app was not behaving in the way I expected. In this particular case, I was getting…

When I search for something, I typically start with pmichaels.net [tab] [search term] - especially if I know I’ve come across a problem…

Some time ago I wrote this post on creating a message on the Service Bus. However, with .Net Core comes a new way of doing things. In fact…

In this post I covered how to debug a failing build. This is more of the same, really; a sort of hodgepodge of bits that have cropped up…

With the new Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the Windows Terminal, comes the ability to run .Net programs on Linux from your Windows…

Windows 10 now has a feature that allows you to install Linux. That’s right - you can install Linux on a Windows machine. If you haven’t…

One of the irritating things about the Asp.Net Core default project is that the various parts of your system are arranged by type, as…

Let me start by saying that this post isn’t intended to try to replace Selenium, or Cypress, or whatever UI testing tools you may choose to…

In this post, I introduced the concept, and Microsoft’s implementation, of Feature Flags. In fact, there’s a lot more to both than I…

In this post, I wrote about how you might draw a graph using the HTML canvas; my next step was to make that more efficient; however, upon…

While recently playing with the HTML Canvas again, it occurred to me that this power could be used for evil (or statistics are it is…

I’ve previously written about how you can write games using tools like React. I’ve also written about creating a basic game in Html and…

While working on a proof of concept, I needed to create a dummy API, and then run a stress test on it. Whilst the activity itself may seem…

I’ve recently been upgrading an EF Core 2.x project to EF Core 3.1. In doing so, I came across the issues in this post. Hopefully, next…

I’ve recently been working with an Asp.Net Core ReactJS application. When trying to debug this remotely, I switched on Development mode in…

I’ve written quite extensively in the past about Azure, and Azure Storage. I recently needed to add a message to an Azure storage queue…

In this post, I wrote about how to mock out the configuration for an application. What I did not cover in that post was whether it was a…

This article covers adding Redux to an existing React application. Redux is one of those technologies where you get introduced to it, and…

When you deploy an Azure App Service, there are occasions when you may need to change the running values. Exactly how you may do this…

This sounds like it’s a very easy thing to do. There are a lot of resources out there on the web, however, I certainly did not find it…

I’ve recently been playing with GitHub actions. Having been around the block a few times, I’ve seen a fair few methods of building and…

I’ve been playing with GitHub Actions in order to create some kind of basic pipeline for a little NuGet library that I created. In this…

I’ve recently been playing around with GitHub Actions. The reason being that I created this little NuGet package, because I needed such a…

If you read this, you’ll learn how to create authorisation, based on a policy. Specifically, they use the example of the user’s age, and…

For anyone that knows me, they’ll know that UI and UX is not exactly my strong suit. If I had my way, we’d all just use console…

Imagine you have the following API endpoint: The controller method for this might look like this: If, for example, you create the sample…

Feature flags enable you to create a new piece of functionality in the main code branch, but behind a mask - so the end user doesn’t see the…

Imagine that you’ve created a Primary Key in Entity Framework (AFAIK, this applies to EF Core and EF 6), and it’s the wrong type: perhaps…

Typescript gives you a number of nice little statically typed features, which Javascript is sadly lacking. However, looking online, most of…

This has been on my list to write up for some time, but this must be the third or fourth time I’ve encountered it - each time I get a vague…

In my previous post I continued with my little series on writing an extension for Visual Studio by completing the functionality to view…

In this post, I wrote about how you can test an EF Database, using an InMemory database. I’m guessing a few people reading this will be…

Since I first wrote about dependency injection in Azure Functions things have moved on a bit. These days, the Azure Functions natively…

Raising an Event is an interesting concept is React: essentially, you pass a function into a component; and then, when the component handles…

This is one of those posts born of the fact that I’m constantly googling this, and coming up with videos and Microsoft docs - I just want a…

Following on from this post, which is the latest in a series on creating a Visual Studio Extension, I’m covering a couple of loose ends…

I imagine this is a very common scenario, so I thought it worth documenting. Let’s take the following controller method in a bog standard…

In .Net Framework (prior to .Net Core), HttpClient was something of a pain. You essentially kept it around in a static variable. If you…

I’ve been playing around with the Azure Signalr Service. I’m particularly interested in how you can bind to this from an Azure function…

Application Insights provides a set of metric tools to analyse the performance and behaviour of various Azure services. For example, you…

Here, I started writing about my efforts to create an extension for Visual Studio that would allow a user to see all of the ADR records in…

.Net is an excellent framework - if you want proof of that, try to do, even very simple things, in Javascript. It feels a bit like getting…

Continuing with my little series on creating a visual studio extension, in this post, I’ll talk about how to add dependency injection to…

I’ve recently had a book published; if you’re interested in seeing what it is, you can find it here. This post is simply a summary of things…

In this post, I refactored a VS Extension Plug-in, that I originally started here. We’ll get the plug-in to list the items found in the…

A short while ago, I wrote an article about how to create a new extension for Visual Studio. The end target of this is to have a tool that…

Some time ago, I was working on a project using WCF RPC calls. We discovered that of the calls that we made, around 10 - 20% were failing…

In EF Core, there is an extension method that allows you to add a DBContext, called AddDBContext. This is a really useful method, however…

I’ve recently been working with Asp.Net Core to build some functionality, involving building a list of values. Typically, with Asp.Net Core…

I’ve previously written about the new Msix packaging project here. One thing that I didn’t cover in that post is that, whilst the process…

One of the main things that was introduced as part of .Net Core 3 was the ability to upgrade your WinForms or WPF application to use Core. I…

Deployment is hard. Arguably, deployment is the reason the web apps have won over desktop apps. I’ve seen applications written as web apps…

It took me a while to collate my notes for this; hopefully this will be the first in a vaguely related series on using Policy Server. Policy…

A while back, I asked on Dev about moving my blog from Wordpress to … well, not Wordpress anymore. My main critera was to Markdown instead…

I’m quite new to Xamarin Forms; I’ve managed to get projects working before now, but I find myself stumbling through the same problems again…

A while back, a colleague of mine brought the concept of ADRs to my attention. The idea being that, when you make a decision on a project…

This is the sixth post of a series that starts here. As with previous posts, if you wish to download the code, it’s here; and, as with…

Imagine that you’re writing a Blazor application - maybe it’s similar to this one. Now, imagine that you have a large chunk of HTML in your…

One thing that’s worth remembering about React is that when you’re updating state, only the Render method gets re-executed. It’s easy (as I…

If you intent to use IoC with a UWP application, there are a lot of options. Most of them come with MVVM packages, like MVVM Cross. These…

After you clone a React repository, running npm start may give this error: ‘react-scripts’ is not recognized as an internal or external…

Example code here. When dealing with any flavour of Javascript, sooner or later, you’re going to come across the this problem. The issue…

I came up with an idea to start a series of posts on React that offers small tips on things you can do, errors that you might get, and…

Whilst there are some pre-built libraries for this, I seemed to be getting Mono linking errors. What finally worked for me was to install…

Being new to Blazor (and Razor), the first thing that tripped me up was that the view seemed divorced from the rest of the application. In…

This is the fifth part of a series (that began here). In the last post, we added the concept of score. The car now can collect cups while…

This is the fourth part of a series (that began here). So far, we have a game where you can whizz around the screen avoiding trees. This…

I got this error recently while updating a project that I’m working on. It had been ported from WinForm to .Net Core 3.0, and worked fine…

In this, the third post of this series, we’re going to add collision to the game. For a full list of the code, please see here. If you’re…

In the second part of this series, we’re going to add some steering to our car, and introduce a concept of obstacles. If you’re wondering…

Since I started looking at React, I’ve wondered whether it would be possible to create a multi-user game. The game would look a little like…

Have you ever tried to do something akin to the following: This is a simple Xunit (failing) test. The reason is fails is because you (or I…

This is the third in a series of posts on interesting things I’ve discovered about React; the first of these can be found here. One of the…

Being relatively new to Xamarin, I naively expected any errors to just show up, you know, like when you run a console app after headbutting…

In this post I wrote about the use of app settings in Asp.Net Core. One thing that I didn’t cover at the time was the fact that, as an…

If you’re playing around with C# 8, and have been for a while, you may spot this message when using nullable reference types: Warning CS863…

On 5th Feb, I attended DDD North. There were many excellent talks on the day, but in this post, I’m delving into something that I saw in…

This isn’t a difficult thing to achieve, but it is one that frequently has me reaching for Google to get the exact syntax. By creating this…

Firstly, this isn’t a bug, or something that you might have done wrong; it’s intentional. Essentially, you can’t run a .Net Standard…

Most languages have a version of the switch statement as far as I’m aware; I must admit, I don’t remember one from Spectrum Basic, but ever…

Following on from my previous post, I’m going to extend our ReactJS application by adding some boxes, and allowing the user to re-arrange…

I thought it might be time for another of my patented “C# Developer’s Guide to…“. Basically, a guide to React for someone that understands…

Up until very recently, creating a Windows Service was the domain of the .Net Framework. However, since the release of the Windows…

If you wanted to produce a self-signed certificate, the way to do this used to be makecert. It was part of the Windows SDK. Since…

I’m afraid this is another of those: “What has AddMvc()” ever done for us posts.  Today, I was creating a brand new .Net Core 2.1 Api and…

If you’ve ever used an IoC container, you’ll know that one of their benefits and burdens is that they abstract away from you the hassle of…

I recently wanted to do a very quick proof of concept, regarding the use of setInterval versus setTimeout after reading that setTimeout was…

In this post, I introduced (to me) a new method of installing client side Javascript libraries for a .Net Web Application. In this follow-up…

As a relative newcomer to the web front-end, one thing that always surprised me was how many moving parts you need to get something running…

When you start using the React sample templates, one thing that you’ll notice is the navigation menu; it tends to look like this: After…

One way that your web-site might be vulnerable to an attack is via Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF). If you’ve ever been logged…

Some time ago (think early to mid-nineties), I used to run a BBS. One Christmas, I logged onto another BBS based in Manchester, and they…

Until recently, I’ve pretty much managed to avoid the container revolution. However, as the tools are becoming much more integrated, and…

Entity Framework Core 2.1 comes with a nifty little feature: an In Memory Database setting. What this means, is that with a single option…

Ever come across a situation where you want to use an Entity Framework data layer in a little tool or report, but ended up reverting to Ado…

I’ve recently been playing around with writing an Asp.Net Core 2 app from scratch. If you’re interested, you can view my exploits here. I…

B2C is (one of) Microsoft’s offering to allow us programmers to pass the business of managing log-ins and users over to people who want to…

Not a huge post, but this has tripped me up several times, and sent me down some quite deep rabbit holes. On to the story… I once had a…

I got this error recently while playing with EF Core 2. There’s very little on Google about it; although it’s not a hugely difficult problem…

Entity Framework Core 2.1 has a nice little feature for seed data. Previously, seeding data quite often involved a series of checks and…

Having had to search for this for the fiftieth time, I thought I’d document it here, so I knew where to look! To set-up a foreign key…

In Asp.Net Core 2, like in previous incarnations of Asp.Net there is a wizard that gives you a head-start with a a simple user log-in…

Imagine you have an Asp.Net Core web page, and you would like to edit some data in a form, but you’d like to default that data to something…

In this previous post, I introduced Azure Event Hubs (to myself mostly). In this post, I’m going to attempt to create a very basic multi…

While playing with Azure Event Hubs, I decided that I wanted to implement a thread locking mechanism that didn’t queue. That is, I want to…

I’ve recently been playing with the Azure Event Hub. This is basically a way of transmitting large amounts* of data between systems. In a…

One of the things that are missing from Azure Logic apps is the ability to integrate human interaction. Microsoft do have their own version…

In this post I started a series of posts covering different scenarios that you might use an Azure Logic App, and how you might go about that…

As with many of these posts - this is more of a “note to self”. Say you have an assertion that looks something like this in your Xunit test…

In previous posts, I’ve talked about setting up notification systems using logic apps, and shown how you might send Tweets automatically…

While looking into the react sample app, I came across a scenario whereby you might need to pass a specific piece of data across to an event…

In this post I started looking into ReactJS. Following getting the sample project running, I decided that I’ve try adding a new screen…

I have previously written about how to, effectively, subclass using Nsubstitute; in this post, I’ll cover how to partially mock out that…

I’ve recently started looking into the Javascript library ReactJS. Having read a couple of tutorials and watched the start of a Pluralsight…

One of the things that is very different when you move to Asp.Net Core is the way that configuration files are treated. This partly comes…

I thought I’d start another of my patented series’. This one is about finding interesting things that can be done with Azure Logic Apps…

One thing to bear in mind about using entity framework is that the DbContext object is not thread safe. This threw me when I first…

Entity Framework can be difficult to get started with: especially if you come from a background of accessing the database directly, it can…

In this post, I wrote about how you might read a message from the service bus queue. However, with Azure Functions (and WebJobs), comes the…

Back in 2010, working at the time in a variety of languages, including VB, I asked this question on StackOverflow. In VB, you could put a…

I’ve previously written about creating Azure functions. I’ve also written about how to react to service bus queues. In this post, I wanted…

Azure Functions are a relatively new kid on the block when it comes to the Microsoft Azure stack. I’ve previously written about them, and…

The full exception is a little more verbose, but not much more helpful: Exception calling “SetData” with “2” argument(s): “Type ‘Microsoft…

On occasion, there may be a case where you go into Test Explorer, knowing that you have XUnit tests within the solution; the Xunit tests are…

When doing validation, There’s a number of options to how you approach it: you could simply have a series of conditional statements testing…

In this post I set out to create a series of posts that would walk through creating a basic game in Swift. In the post preceding this one I…

As usual with my posts, the target audience is ultimately me. In this case, I’m documenting the talks that I’ve seen so that I can remember…

In the beginning When I first started programming (on the Spectrum ZX81), you would typically write a program such as this (apologies if it…

One of the new features of the Microsoft’s Azure offering are Logic Apps: these are basically a workflow system, not totally dis-similar to…

This is the third and final post in a short series on linking up Azure with GCP (for Christmas). In the first post, I set-up a basic Azure…

In the previous post in this series, we covered moving an object around the screen. The next thing to consider to how to shoot the aliens…

One of the things that is quite unnerving when you start using GCP is the billing. Unlike Azure (with your MSDN monthly credits), GCP just…

I’ve had this issue a few times recently. Each time I have it, after I’ve worked out what it was, it makes sense, but I keep running into…

In this post, we covered how to move an object on the screen; this time, we’re going to control it. However, before we do, let’s change the…

In this post, I described how we might attempt to help Santa and his delivery drivers to deliver presents to every child in the world, using…

Regular readers (if there are such things to this blog) may have noticed that I’ve recently been writing a lot about two main cloud…

The Google Cloud Platform provides a Publish / Subscriber system called ‘PubSub’. In this post I wrote a basic guide on setting up RabbitMQ…

Datastore is a NoSql offering from Google. It’s part of their Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The big mind shift, if you’re used to a…

In the first post in this series, I described how to set-up an account and create a very basic program. I also laid out a timeline for…

Here I wrote about how to set-up and configure the MS Azure recommendations engine. One thing that has become painfully apparent while…

In this post and this post I wrote about how you might create a basic Azure function. In this post, I’ll do the same thing using the…

The purpose of this post is to take the code that we created here and run it in the simulator. Leaving the Playground To a .Net programmer…

While attending DDD North this year, I attended a talk on avoiding deadlocks in asynchronous programming. During this talk, I was…

Xamarin Forms is one of those technologies that I keep meaning to play with… but then don’t. Anyway, this is the story of the day that I…

I’ve never programmed with XCode before; I’ve never even owned a Mac, so since I now have access to one, I thought I’d see if I could create…

Working with API projects, it’s easy to miss some key rules about the routing. This post is basically the result of some that I missed, and…

In ASP.Net, there is a concept of an identity. Built on top of this is an authentication system based on claims; allowing applications to…

Everyone who has spent time debugging errors in code that has multiple threads knows the pain of pressing F10 and seeing the cursor jump to…

One of the things that caught my attention at DDD North was the mention of a way to instantiate an object without calling its constructor…

In this post I briefly cover the concept of Storage Accounts and Blob Storage; however, there are more to blobs than this simple use case…

DDD North is held every year at around this time. This year, it was on 14th October at Bradford University. In terms of the sessions that…

Azure provides a number of pre-configured machine learning services out of the box. One of these (still in Beta at the time of writing this…

I came across this issue recently, and realised that I didn’t fully understand extension methods. My previous understanding was that an…

In this post, I discussed the prospect of sending an e-mail from an Azure function in order to alert someone that something had gone wrong…

Until today, I thought that the following code would work: And, by work, I mean output something along the lines of: Main : testing However…

In the world of WCF and SOAP, if you want to consume a WCF service, you simply ask VS to add a service reference, direct it to the WSDL file…

Error: could not find dependent assembly ‘System.Runtime, Version=4.1.1’ This error can occur when you have conflicting versions of a system…

With Update 15.3.1 for Visual Studio came the ability to create Function Apps in VS. Functions were previously restricted to writing code…

Unix users will know the joy of being able to use grep to simply find text somewhere in a file in a directory, or its sub-directories. In…

Another new feature in C# 7.1 is the ability to make a console app deal with Async. Have you ever written a test console app to call an…

One of the new features added to the latest* version of C# is that of a “default” literal. What this means is that you can now use the…

What is irreducible complexity? A common critique levelled at the agile philosophy is that of irreducible complexity. The argument is very…

In this article, I discussed the use of Azure functions; however, Web Jobs perform a similar task. Azure Functions are effectively an…

Azure provides a number of AI services out of the box. The recommendation service is one of these, and it’s part of the Azure Cognitive…

If you create a new ASP.Net application, you get a built-in log-in feature - it provides the log-in page, all the back end services and even…

In this post, I discussed creating an Azure service bus that sends an e-mail as an action once a message has expired; and in this post, I…

Azure functions are Microsoft’s answer to “serverless” architecture. The concept behind Serverless Architecture being that you can create…

I was interested to see how playing multiple videos simultaneously affected the performance of a web page. This probably seems a little…

A message queue has, in its architecture, two main points of failure; the first is the situation where a message is added to a queue, but…

In this post I discussed receiving, processing and acknowledging a message using the Azure Service Bus. There are two ways to acknowledge a…

Imagine that you have an HTML button or element on a page and you would like an effect where the border shines all around the perimeter…

In this post. I documented how to create a new application using Azure Service Bus and add a message to the queue. In this post, I’ll…

Introduction String comparison and manipulation of strings are some of the slowest and most expensive (in terms of GC) things that you can…

I have previously written about message queue systems. The big two, as far as I can see, are Active MQ and RabbitMQ. Microsoft have always…

While doing some testing recently, I created a new bog standard console application and, on pressing F5, nothing happened. The project…

Imagine that you have the following interface: This is an interface, and so may have a number of implementations; however, we know that…

Imagine, for a minute, that you want to rotate a red square around its centre… on a web page. Following on from my previous post about…

This article discusses how to go about creating a basic game loop in HTML5 / JS and to implement control over a sprite. Introduction A few…

While working on this project, I decided that I would see how useful the new feature of “Live Testing” is for TDD. Once you’ve created your…

Oddly, finding an address from given coordinates is not as straightforward as it first appears. The key seems to be to use the…

Javascript is a dynamic, interpreted language. What that means is that, if you mis-type or mis-spell a variable, or even if you don’t…

While working on this project, I found a need to abstract away a base type that the unit tests use (in this instance, it was a queue type…

This post discusses how you might implement an address search with Bing Maps. Disclaimer I know that Bing Maps 6.3 is shortly to be…

I recently (accidentally) created a Unit Test project as a standard C# class library. Although you don’t need to change this to a test…

Having looked at CSS in the past, and thought that it’s probably something that people who are better at UI design that me should concern…

Using Bing Maps to display the user’s current position should be an easy task. As with everything in Javascript, this kind of thing is only…

Unit testing massively benefits from following the Arrange / Act / Assert pattern. I’ve seen tests that are not written in this way, and…

WPF typically doesn’t have many performance issues and, where it does, this can usually be fixed by virtualisation. Having said that, even…

Error MSB4019 The imported project “C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\1.0.0-rc4-004771\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\DotNet\Microsoft.DotNet.Props…

Say what you like about ORM frameworks, but they do decrease time to market. My impression, as someone that has generally had very little…

SignalR is an open source framework allowing bi-directional communication between client and server. Basically, it uses a stack of…

There are many systems out there in the wild, and some new ones being written, that use database logic extensively. This article discusses…

The purpose of the library is to allow you to try new code in a small sample of production usage - effectively, testing in production. The…

WPF is an interesting (and currently still active framework. How long that will continue depends, IMHO, largely on how well MS can bring…

Why would you do this? PCLs don’t support them Okay - How? Small victories.

Not sure this qualifies as a game, but it’s a computerised version of the building blocks that you might give to a three-year-old. What can…

The following error: Exception thrown: ‘System.MissingMethodException’ in CreateTestCase.exe Additional information: Method not found: ‘Void…

Recently at DDD North I saw a talk on MS cognitive services. This came back and sparked interest in me while I was looking at some TFS APIs…

How to manually parse a JSON string using JSON.NET. Disclaimer If you jump straight to the references, you will find a very similar set of…

Due to a series of blog posts that I’m writing on TFS and MS Cognitive Services, I came across a requirement to identify duplicate values in…

Let’s assume that the built-in TFS standard templates are not sufficient for you. You’re in luck: TFS allows you to create your own custom…

Having looked into this for some time; I came up with the following method of extracting team project tags. I’m not for a minute suggesting…

In this earlier post, I discussed how to create a test case via the TFS API. For my next trick, I’m going to create some test case steps…

The following code should return a list of all files in the “My Documents” folder: The returned count from this code is (in my case) 1…

Previously I’ve covered how to programmatically create a bug in TFS. In this post, we’ll create a test case to cover it. Set-up What we’re…

If you’re creating a TFS API program from scratch, the first thing that you’ll need is to reference the TFS API libraries. They are in…

Some years ago, I had an idea for an application, and the functionality of that application involved extracting the contents of a zip file…

Accessing the documents library from a UWP app is frowned upon by Microsoft; however, it is possible. Here is some code that will access…

(Note: if you want to follow the code on this, you might find it easier if you start from the project that I create here.) A queue in a…

Conceptually, message queues work in a similar fashion: you send a message to an exchange, the exchange allows people to read the message…

Whilst trying to add a dead letter exchange to an existing queue, I got the following error: Exception thrown: ‘RabbitMQ.Client.Exceptions…

Mesh colliders are, generally speaking, a bad idea in Unity. The reason being that they cause collision based on the detailed mesh that…

Following on from my previous post on Active MQ, I’m now going to explore creating a mechanism whereby the message can fail. The main issue…

In Investigating message queues with RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ, I came across a problem that I’ve never considered before. Starting two…

Following this year’s trip to DDD North I got speaking to someone about Rabbit MQ. I’d previously done some research on Active MQ, however…

This was one of the features that interested me most in message queues. Basically, you have an application, and you want to communicate to…

I’ve recently been experimenting with message queues. I’ve used MSMQ in the past, but never with any complexity, and so I thought I’d spend…

One of the things that is necessary if you subscribe to the feature branching method of source control in TFS is that, once a release is cut…

Based on this earlier post, I returned to my test project to find that it didn’t actually pass anymore. The first issue was that the test…

Coming back to MVVMCross and trying to create a new project, I found that some of the documentation available for the new version (4.2.2 at…

I’ve recently started investigating the use of SQLite for the purpose of storing data in my UWP application. Before I start, the following…

I used to believe that Nunit’s TestCase test (that is, an ability to define a test and then simply pass it alternate parameters) was denied…

Templates in SSMS work really well; if you select to create a new stored procedure, you’ll get a skeleton procedure, and then placeholders…

I recently came across a little known feature of SSMS that made me think that, for small amounts of data, it may be possible to create a…

I learned about these two functions accidentally last year, and I wanted to try them both out to see what they do. A long time ago, I used…

If you deal with multiple web servers, all with the same service addresses, but in different locations, you’ll find you’re constantly in…

I’ve had a couple of problems recently, where I’ve had tasks or asynchronous methods and they don’t quote fit into the architecture that I…

Sharing has changed slightly between Windows 8 and 10, but broadly speaking, the concept is the same. This article is pretty much where I…

In the new Universal Windows Platform, you can store settings data in many ways. These days, there are multiple cloud options that you can…

I recently upgraded my iPhone 5c to an SE. Everything seems a little smoother on the SE (although I’d swear blind it gave me an electrical…

While following this article on how to add in-app purchases to UWP apps, I came across a little quirk of conditional compilation directives…

Having recently released my latest app into the store, I noticed that some of the buttons didn’t fit well on the phone version. I’d already…

Something that I spotted today (mainly because my app got ‘notes’ during its submission to the store) is the frame rate counter that is on…

Following on from an earlier post I decided that the speech bubble in that post would look more like a … bubble if the corners were rounded…

I recently tried to introduce a concept of a tooltip that appeared as a speech bubble; that is, a box that has a pointer to the originating…

I recently posted an article which morphed into a discovery of the Intelli-Test feature in VS2015. My initial findings were relating to…

Recently, I published this article on copying a class dynamically. I then found that I could use the same approach to clear a class. Here…

Following on from an earlier post about my discovery of an API to control IIS, I had cause to investigate creating a new web application in…

Occasionally, you find that you want to copy a class to another instance of itself. There are various reason, but typically the code can…

While looking for a way to automate some IIS tasks, I discovered this, Microsoft Produced, NuGet package. It appears to give almost full…

I recently started getting this error on a solution: It didn’t actually report any errors, other than this and, no matter what I tried…

The following code will list all the SQL Server instances on the local machine. … assuming the registry is correct

In my recent escapades into the murky world of deploying dacpac files into a SQL DB, it occurred to me that the location of the SQLPackage…

I have written a couple of articles around this; relating to transmitting large files over WCF and enabling filestream in SQL. This article…

Whilst playing about with this feature of SQL Server, I encountered the above error. This post should lead you around the error. It does…

I’m currently writing a breakout style game (which, if you’ve seen any of my previous posts, you might have divined). One of the things…

This describes a method of persisting data in Unity. For example, saving and loading the current game level. The first thing that you will…

In previous posts regarding Unity, I’ve made the comment that I’m quite new to Unity… but I’m not new to C#, and have been a little…

Continuing on with my list of things that I’ve found in unity (I’m using 5, but have no reason to believe these wouldn’t work for 4), I had…

Unity seems to have a multi-threaded system, but I could find no way of accessing the dispatcher. Consequently, it’s necessary to create…

I’m quite new to Unity, and so thought I would start blogging useful things that I’ve discovered. Obviously, there is the which is…

Just a little helper method that I used in a recent project to delete files, given a particular name, and excluding a provided list of files…

Pointlessly Long Introduction (feel free to skip) Some time ago, in a previous job, I was asked to add spell checking to a WPF textbox. I…

It appears that the functionality to create a temporary file was omitted from Windows 8 / 10 If anyone knows this to not be the case then…

The following is a XAML page that allows the user to draw on it. This was written and tested under a Windows 10 desktop application, but…

In trying to write a Windows 10 Desktop application that refreshes an image on the screen within a timer; I had the following code: However…

The following is a quick tutorial on how to load a series of images from the machine and display them on screen. This is something that I’m…

Believe it or not, Windows 10 comes with OCR capabilities out of the box. It’s actually very easy to use as well; admittedly, it’s not the…

Having upgraded to Windows 10 recently, I came across an idea for a new app. Part of what this app is supposed to do it allow scanning of…

Given a standard interface, how to retrieve all implementing classes and run the interface methods. Unit testing through test driven…

WCF is a good product in so many respects; but error reporting isn’t one of them. Whilst trying to get a WCF service to work, I encountered…

This is an interesting one - it is possible to load a binary file (such as an exe) in a .NET service and return it to the client via WCF…

I recently had a situation where I loaded a solution containing a suite of NUnit tests, but the test explorer would not recognise them. The…

Around this time last year, I published a review of NDepend. They contacted me around June and asked me to have a look at version 6. The…

This morning I didn’t have internet access and was trying to find this in my notes (which are also my blog posts), and I couldn’t; so purely…

Continuing from previous posts on programs that generally do your machine no good at all, I thought it might be an idea to have a look what…

I recently saw a question on SO relating to this, and pretty much every answer was: “Use LINQ To Xml”. Which is good advice. If you don’t…

I recently published this article on using asynchonous methods within a Windows Game, and this article on enabling consumables within a…

What are consumables Consumables are a type of in-app purchase that can be used within your app or game; by used, I mean, for example, coin…

This is not an undocumented subject; however, I didn’t find everything I needed in a single place; so this is my single point of reference…

In this previous post I gave an example of a DOS batch script that simulated an unstable network. This is an alternative to that in .NET…

The new async / await syntax in .NET 4.5 + makes asynchronous programming really easy. However, there are times when having an assumption…

I thought I’d share this little DOS script that I’ve been using to simulate an unstable network connection on a local IIS: Not rocket…

I recently decided to create a new Windows Store app, that was very similar to one that I’d already created; I decided that it would be a…

I recently came across a need to serialise and de-serialise an ObservableCollection from an MVVMCross application. To achieve this, I…

Recently I was working on a console app; my start-up arguments looked like this: ArgumentOne “c:\tmp\” “c:\tmp2” And I got an error with…

Coded UI Tests are something I’ve always thought would be useful, but have only recently actually used. This post is details of the first…

Admittedly this isn’t my usual type of post. However, I’ve had a number of occasions where the touchpad on my Toshiba Satellite L855-18…

I recently had a very strange error while using the TFS API. The error was with the following code: The problem being that `buildServer…

This article describes how to stub out the IMvxMainThreadDispatcher, used by MVVM Cross, using Rhino Mocks. Here is an excellent article on…

MVVM Light CanExecute doesn’t work for commands The following code in MVVM light does not work: That is, the bound command will not update…

I recently had cause to write a universal app that has voice capabilities. Hopefully it will shortly be available on the Windows Store…

I’ve been playing around with an app to maintain a score. The first thing that I wanted to do was to split the screen, but I wanted a…

Following on from this post, I encountered the following error: Value does not fall within the expected range. Here’s the culpable code…

Following this question on Stack Overflow, I tried using the following code to add a tile in Windows phone: This gives the following…

Introduction This is pretty much my first try on Android. I’ve downloaded tools in the past… and even faced one or two of the problems…

Based on the previous post on this, our next task is to introduce our falling objects. This is my second go at this post, because I…

I’ve written a series of posts based on teaching programming to children (specifically my 9 year old children). Currently, we’ve managed to…

Recently, I discovered a bug with one of my Windows Store games - Maths Races. The issue was that when a number key was pressed, the…

This is quite a straightforward process, and well documented in several places - including here and here; and the sample that I used to…

This is a neat little trick that I came across when looking for a way to arbitrarily assign a unique index to each element in a collection…

The Problem There are times when creating a WCF service that you may want to return a value, whilst not knowing precisely which value; for…

I recently re-visited this project, and found that, amongst other things, it would no longer run up. Clearly something had changed, and it…

Recently, I’ve been playing with the WPF `RepeatButton`. I’ve not used it before, as it does seem to fulfil a very specific purpose. The…

It’s finally happened: a “10 things” post. This is basically a summation of the information that I wanted when I asked this question. One…

Following on from this post I discovered that I did, indeed, have a recursive reference in my game file. After a little searching, I found…

Continuing on from my series of posts on writing a console game with my children, this post will cover the score and speed up the game a…

Collision detection is pretty much necessary for any arcade game. Super Mario would be pretty boring if he just walked through the…

Trying to save the game class of a game that I’m working on, I got a Stack Overflow error. I’m using MVVMCross, and my code looked like this…

The console snake game is progressing well. Based on where we got to on the last post, we had a game where the snake itself was behaving…

Following on from this post, we were creating a snake game for the purpose of teaching a 9 year old to program. This post will not make…

Based on this earlier post, we had a working console game. Admittedly it doesn’t do much, apart from allow you to move a star around the…

The Error Service ‘Namespace.ServiceName’ has zero application (non-infrastructure) endpoints. This might be because no configuration file…

Recently I upgraded from MVVMCross 3.1.1 to 3.2.1 and everything broke. The reason was that suddenly, the MvxStorePage was unavailable…

This can occur in a situation such as the following: This will fail to compile with the error message: Cannot modify members of ‘pnt…

Recently I began trying to teach my children some basics of programming. I’d previously tried teaching them using tools like Scratch, but…

The new thing for VS 2013 is Universal Apps. They allow you to create a Win 8 and Phone app with shared code. But what if you’re writing…

The Behaviors SDK was introduced recently for WinRT. Here’s how you could use it to add functionality to a Listview to scroll to the newest…

While creating my game, I recently came across the problem of navigation. This post describes how to create a custom user control and react…

I was previously using VS2013, but after running 14 just once, I saw no reason to go back. I thought I’d jot down some notes on my…

Yesterday, for the first time, I saw Windows 10. I set it up in a VM inside Win 8. The following post in a combination of conjecture…

My last post suggested a concept of having a `Selectable` Model, which effectively wraps a model in a class with a generic item and an…

Basically, it’s not possible. However, this is the best (and only that works) workaround that I found. Subclass the Listview I tried…

There are a number of things that can cause this, but HTTP Activation should be enabled: That is all.

Introduction and Disclaimer I was asked around the middle of August if I would consider reviewing a product called NDepend; in exchange for…

How to bind Windows 8 XAML to a View Model. Although this post is based on an example using MVVM Cross, it will work for any MVVM framework…

A quick forward: there is nothing in this post that isn’t already published here: https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross/wiki/Value…

I thought I’d jot this down, as it had me for a short while. Imagine that you have a line of code that looks like this: But nothing happens…

As usual with these posts, although the specific code in the article relates to MVVM Cross, it should be applicable to any MVVM framework…

Okay, quick spoiler for this: you can’t. You can’t, not really; obviously, you can write the test, but unit tests should be predictive, and…

Typically, extension methods and helpers are small methods that allow the same functional code to be re-used. An excellent (and useful…

Having covered basic navigation, I found that I needed to pass my game state from view-model to view-model. I initially thought that I…

Windows 8 is a great operating system, but sometimes, without knowing the shortcuts and apps available, it can be difficult to achieve even…

I’m quite new to MVVM Cross. I thought I’d start another series of posts on my progress (I haven’t forgotten about the others). Especially…

Occasionally, if you’re especially lucky, you’ll get into a situation where you have SQL procedures and functions that are so complicated…

Recently, Twitter in their wisdom, discontinued the support for atom feed.  I have a couple of programs that were interrogating this, and…

We left the last post where the Tile Updater could update text, or images, but we basically had to choose which at design time. In this…

We’re still missing functionality to show the text, or show the text and an image where both are specified. Add text Let’s start with the…

In Part 4 we finished with an MVVM app, running on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. In this post I’m going to explore the idea of using…

From Part 3 of this tutorial, we finished with a small program running on both Windows 8.1 and Phone 8. It shared most of its business logic…

In a divergence from my usual software development ramblings, I thought I’d post my opinions on my latest phone (an iPhone 5c), along with…

In the third part of my series on creating a universal app, I’m going to transfer the code that we created in part 2 and move it into a…

In my first post of this series I looked at some considerations of designing a store / phone app. This post will cover the basics of…

A walkthrough of creating a Windows Universal App from scratch There is a new type of project that allows the creation of Windows 8 and…

Admittedly this does sound like a strange one. How or why would you both to test a resource file? The only reason I could think of was…

I’ve already posted a few times on handling input for Monogame. This one’s a little bit different though, and came from the fact that I had…

Recently, I got to the stage where I had just about finished one of my games, and suddenly realised that I had done nothing to deal with…

One of the best features of Windows 8 is that it allows you to store all your contacts in one place. This means you can link your e-mail…

I’ve already blogged a few times on using monogame with XAML. One thing that occurred to me recently was that I could leverage this in…

Some time ago, I blogged about the importance of creating a “Monogame With XAML” project. Before I’d written this, I’d started a long…

Once you’ve created your project, should you wish you distribute your software to multiple countries, then the question of localisation must…

I got this error recently - seemingly for no reason. I thought it might be an idea to share the workaround, as I didn’t find it anywhere…

The RelayCommand is an excellent way to communicate between a view and View Model in MVVM without creating a link to a specific instance of…

Gestures in this environment are hard. Ridiculously hard. There is a ReadGesture function, but it doesn’t work. Let’s imagine that you…

This question originally came up as a StackOverflow Question. Basically, the problem was, how can I tell which of my workspaces are now…

The async / await keywords allow asynchrony extremely easily in comparison to previous implementations; however, this blog post is a word of…

I recently asked this question on Stack Overflow and, although the answer I got was correct, I thought I would write it up so that a clearer…

This does sound counter intuitive, but let’s have a look at an example. Let’s say that I want to create an application that, when called…

Recently, I came across a strange problem with a DataGrid while using the MVVM-Light pattern. The problem was that I needed to implement…

Introduction In this post, I would like to specifically focus on the differences between animations in WPF and in WinRT. Some quick…

Introduction Following on from http://pmichaelsdev.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/animation-in-xaml-part-3/ this post is about achieving the…

Introduction In this article, I’m going to expand on the first posts, by providing an alternative way to chain animations. In this article…

Introduction This is the second of my series of posts on animation, using WPF and XAML. In this post, I’m looking at how we can control an…

Introduction I recently wrote a little application in WPF, which displayed a button. I thought it would be nice to have the button “burst…

If, like me, you aren’t getting very many reviews for your Windows Store Apps, you might want to give people a nudge. Be careful with this…

Believe it or not, the MessageBox.Show() function is unavailable for WinRT. Admittedly, you probably shouldn’t be using it too much. But…

I recently started using the MVVM Light framework to create an app. One of the first things that I found tripped me up was trying to link…

I recently completed by second game in Windows 8 (the first using the MonoGame framework). Given the MonoGame architecture, displaying a…

This has been covered many times on the web, but when using Monogame it isn’t as straightforward (not that it’s rocket science). The key…

Introduction I haven’t written anything for a while, but I spent a good while on the issue below, so I thought I’d share. The Problem I…

I’m currently trying to write my first game using the Windows 8 platform. I’ve just finished a painful time trying to work out how to…

I found this test project while doing a spring clean, and thought it would be ripe for a blog post.  To illustrate the problem that this is…

This is the second time I’ve typed this. For some reason, WordPress musn’t have liked the first attempt, and so trashed it - which is…

If you usually program in a language such as C#, you’ll be used to the this keyword.  If you aren’t then in C#, this means this; that is, it…

I’ve seen a few articles on this, but none dealing directly with a Windows 8 Store App.  Not that much changes in the general approach, but…

This is basically just a test post.  I’ve never really blogged before and thought that now would be a good time to start - predominantly…