Blog

.Net Open Source Series - 3. Test

This is a series on my findings around building open source software online for free. There are many SAAS (Software As A Service) platforms out there and a lot of these are free to use with your open source projects. But not all of these work with C# and .Net. So this series highlights the tools and products out there …

.Net Open Source Series - 2. Build

This is a series on my findings around building open source software online for free. There are many SAAS (Software As A Service) platforms out there and a lot of these are free to use with your open source projects. But not all of these work with C# and .Net. So this series highlights the tools and products out there …

.Net Open Source Series - 1. Source Control

This is a series on my findings around building open source software online for free. There are many SAAS (Software As A Service) platforms out there and a lot of these are free to use with your open source projects. But not all of these work with C# and .Net. So this series highlights the tools and products out there …

Introducing BCLExtensions

It has been a pipe-dream of mine for a while to have my very own C# extensions library. Well now I do. I’ve been chipping away at a library on github for ages (my init commit was 15 Sep 2012!) and it is finally a real thing! I’ve got a V1.0.0, a Nuget package, and even 100% coverage. I even have the …

monocov + Travis-CI = WINNING

After much frustration, I now have monocov running on my Travis-CI build, and I’m going to share with you how I did it. TL;DR The coverage results don’t seem accurate just yet, but jump to the end to see the full script to get it going on your build. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am building a …

Visual Studio PowerShell

I’ve been using psake as my build tool and running my builds on Appveyor. Now Appveyor runs with all the visual studio commands available on the path. When you install visual studio, It gives you a special cmd shell shortcut that loads you an environment with all the visual studio stuff available, which is cool. …

Introducing Coveralls.net

So I’ve built an (almost MVP) code coverage publisher for coveralls.io from C# code, using opencover coverage results. Checkout the github repo and nuget packages if you want to use it. I’m even dogfooding it on appveyor as part of my psake build tasks. So how do you use it? Well luckily I used docopts.net …

Mediaportal: no network, no cards

I just moved house, and of course the first thing to do is plug in the media pc running MediaPortal, so that my shows will record. But as you would expect, change brings problems. It doesn’t start. The pc boots, everything looks ok, but the TV-Server doesn’t seem to be running. When I tried to launch the …

Semantics vs implementation detail

When we write out classes and variables, we are pretty good at naming them for what they represent. What I mean by this, is that when we declare a customer first name variable, we don’t call it firstNameString, or cfnString, and we have also lost the bad habit of firstNameStr or strFirstName. The implementation …

Thoughts on Testing

I’ve gone through the regular evolution when it comes to writing tests. At first there was no time, didnt bother. This was mostly down to the fact I was building demo apps and samples that got less use than it took to build them, working with senior devs who had made their name making said apps. The next stage is …

Git Housekeeping

Those who are using Git but still new to the concept will no doubt have realised that files are treated differently to normal source control tools, and that they transition between different known states, according to git. I am going to try and explain these states, and give commands on how to transition between them. …

Travis-ci, C# and PCL

As any good library should do, I’m building my BCLExtensions project(extensions for the .net base class library) using PCL (Portable class library, Profile328 to be exact). It works great on my AppVeyor CI builds, which is a great .Net windows build server. I recently discovered Travis-CI has added beta C# …

Hey, I found this thing called Coveralls.io

In my pursuit to find a build task runner for my code coverage I stumbled on this whole other side of the internet I didn’t know about (from a .Net developer’s perspective). I’ve been using AppVeyor.com for my open-source CI build, which is a great option for anyone with a project on the Microsoft …

Gulp vs .net

I wanted to add continuous code coverage to my little extension library project, and so realised i would need to run one of nCover, dotCover or openCover from the command line on my build server. This calls for a task based build automation library! Because I’m started to learn more about this nodejs thing as a …

New Zealand Public holidays Calendar

Want to see all the New Zealand public holidays on your calendar on your Google Calendar, but don’t want to have to enter them yourself, or maintain them? I found this great page with public holidays and calendars on the MBIE site. They have the New Zealand public holidays here for the current, past and future …

Mockups and Sketches - Overview

This is part of a wireframing series Overview First Draft Balsamiq Blend with Sketchflow This is a companion post to my talk at welliDotNet, Wellington’s .Net User Group on Wednesday 4th April 2012. The slides can be downloaded here. I want to give you a brief introduction to creating designs and mockups for …

Hosts entries and windows services

This is regarding an issue where the hosts file is being ignored when running a service as local system. Skip to the bottom for the solution or read on if you care what lead to the need for this in the first place. The Problem Recently I had an issue with my machine and hosts file being ignored. I was using a Windows …

7 Lessons from Building a WP7 Game in 7 days

This is a companion post for my talk at Wellington’s SLAMD user group on 6 July 2011. Recently I took part in Nigel Parker’s “Release an App for Windows Phone 7 in 7 Days for a Chance to Win a New HTC 7 Trophy Phone” competition, with the intent of winning a Windows Phone 7 device. Although I …

Bing Maps Control Series - 2: Add a simple map to your application

This is part 2 of a series on using the Silverlight Bing Maps Control. If haven’t already, check out part 1. So Now that you have installed the Bing Maps Silverlight Control, and got yourself a key, you need to add the control to your project. For completeness, lets start by creating a new Silverlight 4 …

Bing Maps Control Series - 1: Downloading and Installing the Tools

Over the last month or so I have has the opportunity to develop using the Bing Maps Control for Silverlight, and thought it appropriate to share this experience as well as a bit of a ‘how to’ on using it. I plan for this to be a bit of a series based on the following items: - Downloading and Installing the …