Sverrir Sigmundarson's blog about programming, software development and technology
In a [previous article](/2017/05/vs-itemtemplates-wizards-and-vsix.html) I discussed how to create Item and Project templates and bundle them into their own VSIX installers. However, now that you have your VSIX installer the question becomes how do you distribute it to all your coworkers? It would be great if they could use the _Extensions and Updates_ manager that is already built into Visual…
**News flash** You can create your own item and project templates for use with Visual Studio! Well I guess this is not really so big news if you've used the IDE for a while. Templates for files housing source code, resource configurations, configuration files and many other things can in many cases quickly out weigh any cost that it entails creating one. Especially if you're working on a large…
> "So here is the thing, we want to have a list of values that the user can choose from in the cells of our sheet" > __-Your boss__ Dropdown lists of the sort shown below are very common and can be hugely beneficial for users when filling out Excel sheets. They are quite easy to create and offer basic data validation so that the user can't accidentally type in the wrong value. Lists with values…
Extracting values from HTML form elements in webpages has historically been and still is a messy business when done client-side. Usually the process entails a rather cumbersome hand-written javascript function that acesses each DOM form element and extracts its value into a variable for later use. Many of the modern MVVM frameworks solve this by using view-model classes that are data-bound to the…
I recently came across a rather subtle and nasty bug when using PHP to parse the responses from the [Google Elevation API](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/intro). Example response from Google Elevation API ``` js { "elevation" : 1701.672119140625, "location" : { "lat" : 39.72886619204346, "lng" : -105.1162936849545 }, "resolution" : 4.771975994110107 } ``` The same…
Enabling VBA code in Excel to receive and handle chart events is not very straight forward to do. Fortunately there are quite a few useful guides available for this, e.g. [Jon Peltier](http://peltiertech.com/chart-events-microsoft-excel/) and [David J. Brett](http://stackoverflow.com/a/7441360/779521). I recently had to do some custom VBA coding in Excel 2010 and a complete working demo would have…
I have been a fan of the [GPAC](https://gpac.wp.mines-telecom.fr/downloads/) video tool package for a while. I've especially found their `mp4box` utility useful when dealing with mp4 files. Adding subtitles, creating chapters, combining multiple audio streams, you name it. This little tool does it all and blazingly fast. See tool However I recently ran into a small annoyance when I had to…
I recently learned that the true and tested pagination gem for jekyll [jekyll-paginate](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-paginate) had been decommissioned and removed from Jekyll 3. This is unfortunate as this gem is very good but lacks only a few major new features, most notibly the feature to paginate on a subset of your posts (e.g. only paginate on certain categories, tags or languages). > Be…
Google published a handy API to implement hit tracking in your projects, the [Measurement Protocol](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/). This API is especially useful for APIs and other platforms that cannot use the pre-existing solutions to communicate usage and tracking stats with the Google Analytics servers. # The Protocol The Analytics Mesurement…
Today I [learned](http://stackoverflow.com/a/5128451/779521) that you can run a simple local webserver for static content with only a single line ``` python python -m http.server [ ] ``` That is simply awesome! It will serve all available files and even list directory contents for you with no problems. However this basic [http.server](https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.server.html) is very…