Life as a mort.
This is my last post here at Code Rant. From now I will be posting at mikehadlow.com . I've written a post on my new blog here explaining the reasons. Thanks for visiting Code Rant and please take a moment to look at my new blog.
Invoking the C# compiler directly allows one to pass in symbols for the preprocessor via a command option (-define or -d). But it's not at all obvious how to do this with the dotnet build command. There is no 'define' flag, so how do you do it? Let me first show you how this works using the C# compiler directly: Create a new file 'Program.cs' with this code: using System; namespace CscTest { class…
If you are using Azure DevOps pipelines to automate building your .NET Core application Docker images, it's natural to also want to use the DevOps Artifacts NuGet feed for your internally hosted NuGet packages. Unfortunately there is much confusion and misinformation about how to authenticate against the Artifacts NuGet feed. While researching this topic I found various sources saying that you…
An experience report of converting a large microservice platform from .NET Framework to dotnet core. Background For the last year or so I’ve been working with company that maintains a significant trading platform built in .NET. The architecture consists of a number of Windows Service components that communicate using RabbitMQ with EasyNetQ . These are all backend components that at the top level…
I originally wrote this piece as of part of a paper evaluating container technology for a client. This document describes container technology, best represented by Docker. Containerization is a game changing technology that’s experiencing rapid adoption. Some measures have around 25% of companies now using Docker in some form ( https://www.datadoghq.com/docker-adoption/ ). Containers can…
This article discusses the relationship in software development between code organisation and social organisation. I discuss why software and teams do not scale easily, lessons we can learn from biology and the internet, and show how we can decouple software and teams to overcome scaling problems. The discussion is based on my 20 years experience of building large software systems, but I’ve also…
Note. This post had a great response on Reddit with over 300 comments . I’ve added an update section to the end of this post to address some of the main criticisms. A visual programming language is one that allows the programmer to create programs by manipulating graphical elements rather than typing textual commands. A well known example is Scratch , a visual programming language from MIT that’s…
Guitar Dashboard is a side project I’ve been working on occasionally over the past two years. It’s an open source web application (you can find it at http://guitardashboard.com/ and the code at https://github.com/mikehadlow/gtr-cof ). It’s intended as an interactive music theory explorer for guitarists that graphically links theoretical concepts, such as scales, modes and chords to the guitar…
If you’ve ever had any experience with music technology, or more specifically sequencers, keyboards or synthesisers, you will have come across MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). It’s used to send note and controller messages from musical devices, such as keyboards or sequencers which are used to play and record music, and devices that produce sounds, such as samplers or synthesizers.…
AsmSpy is a tool I wrote a few years ago to view assembly version conflicts. Despite the fact that it started as a single page of code command line application, it’s been one of my more successful open source efforts. I still use it all the time, especially now with the ‘forking’ of .NET into Framework and Core and spreading use of dotnet standard, both good things IMHO, but not without the…
Being both a long-time .NET developer and Linux hobbyist, I was very excited about the recent ‘go live’ announcement for CoreCLR on Linux (and Windows and Mac). I thought I’d have a play with a little web server experiment on an Amazon EC2 instance. To start with I tried to get the KesteralHttpServer sample application working which wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped , so this post is a note of the steps…
TL;DR: All the evidence shows that programming requires a high level of aptitude that only a small percentage of the population possess. The current fad for short learn-to-code courses is selling people a lie and will do nothing to help the skills shortage for professional programmers. This post is written from a UK perspective. I recognise that things may be very different elsewhere, especially…
My recent post, C# Program Entirely With Static Methods , got lots of great comments. Indeed, as is often the case, the comments are in many ways a better read than the original post. However, there were several commenters who claimed that C# does not have partial application. I take issue with this. Any language that supports higher order functions, that is, functions that can take functions as…
OK, that’s a provocative title to get your attention. This post is really about how one can move to a more functional programming style and remove the need for much of the apparatus of object-oriented programming, including interfaces and classes. In this post, I’m going to take some typical object-oriented C# code and refactor it in a more functional style. I’ll show that the result is more…
Streams are a very nice abstraction over a read/write loop. We can use them to represent the contents of a file, or a stream of bytes to or from a network socket. They make it easy to read and write large amounts of data without consuming large amounts of memory. Take this little code snippet: Example.txt may be many GB in size, but this operation will only ever use the amount of memory configured…
If you have logic that relies on the current system date, it's often difficult to see how to unit test it. But by injecting a function that returns DateTime.Now we can stub the current date to be anything we want it to be. Let's look at an example. Here we have a simple service that creates a new user instance and saves it in a database: public class UserService : IUserService { private readonly…
In my last post I showed a simple F# OWIN self hosted server without an application framework. Today I want to show an even simpler example that doesn’t reference any of the Microsoft OWIN libraries, but instead uses an open source server implementation, Nowin . Thanks to Damien Hickey for pointing me in the right direction. The great thing about the Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) is that it…
I’m still very much an F# noob, but yesterday I thought I’d use it to write a little stub web service for a project I’m currently working on. I simply want to respond to any POST request to my service. I don’t need routing, or any other ‘web framework’ pieces. I just wanted to use the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.OwinSelfHost package to create a little web service that runs inside a console program.…
TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmented and hard to maintain code base. Sometimes it is better to favour consistent legacy technology over fragmentation. An ‘anti-pattern’ describes a commonly encountered pathology or problem in software development. The Lava Layer (or Lava Flow) anti-pattern is…
I’m on a sales drive. I want to move away from daily-rate contracting, and focus on full-lifecycle project delivery. I’ve created a new website to help market myself http://mikehadlow.com/ . I’m looking for customers who want software written to a specification for a fixed price. I’ve been working in IT since 1996, although I’ve played with computers and programming since I was a teenager. Except…
TL:DR You can not observe a developer without altering their behavior. First a story. Several years ago I worked on a largish project as one of a team of developers. We were building an internal system to support an existing business process. Initially things went very well. The user requirements were reasonably well defined and we worked effectively iterating on the backlog. We were mostly left…
I’m working on an exciting new project at the moment. The main UI element is a management console built with AngularJS that communicates with a HTTP/JSON API built with NancyFX and hosted using the Katana OWIN self host. I’m quite new to this software stack, having spent the last three years buried in SOA and messaging, but so far it’s all been a joy to work with. AngularJS makes building single…
I haven’t contracted through an agency for a long time, but I thought I’d write up my experiences from almost ten years of working as an IT contractor for anyone considering it as a career choice. IT recruitment agencies provide a valuable service. Like any middle-man, their job is to bring buyers and sellers together. In this case the buyer is the end client, the company that needs a short-term…
Docker is a lightweight virtualization technology for Linux that promises to revolutionize the deployment and management of distributed applications. Rather than requiring a complete operating system, like a traditional virtual machine, Docker is built on top of Linux containers, a feature of the Linux kernel, that allows light-weight Docker containers to share a common kernel while isolating…
I’ve just started looking at Docker . It’s a cool new technology that has the potential to make the management and deployment of distributed applications a great deal easier. I’d very much recommend checking it out. I’m especially interested in using it to deploy Mono applications because it promises to remove the hassle of deploying and maintaining the mono runtime on a multitude of Linux…