Simon Reynolds

Continuous Integration

TeamCity build times and npm

When npm install is taking too long on your build server, npm ci may be jut the command you need

Git

Morning routine - updating git repos

Fetch pending changes for all git repositories in a directory using PowerShell

C#

Immutability

One of biggest trends in the last few years is functional programming, once again proving that fashion goes in circles. Immutability is a central tenet of functional programming, the idea is that variables are not variable, once an object is created it does not change. If you need to modify

F#

A simple F# ternary operator

While porting some C# to F# recently I got sick of rewriting ternary operators like this var result = condition ? "True Branch" : "False Branch"; into a form like this let result = if condition then "True Branch" else "False Branch" or let result = match

JavaScript

Type hints for JavaScript in Visual Studio Code

You've got some javascript you want to refactor so you open Visual Studio Code and get cracking. But since you've decided to write it in plain javascript it's an untyped mess. You look at that property you just renamed, are you sure you found

Entity Framework

Updating NuGet packages and references

Updating Nuget packages should be simple. Sometimes you get version errors or a TargetInvocationException at runtime for no clear reason

Git

GitHub and patches awesomeness

GitHub has a lot of neat features but this has to be my new favourite one. If you're looking at a pull request, example at https://github.com/simon-reynolds/url-magic/pull/1 you can quickly view the diff by going to https://github.com/simon-reynolds/url-magic/pull/1.

Some weeks are better than others

I met a developer from an antique land Who said: 18 vast servers of stone Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet

C#

Verbatim strings and string interpolation

There have always been a few different ways of dealing with strings of text in C#, depending on what we need we might use any of the following; string normalString = "This is a string, to include a line break we need to escape it like this \n so it

JavaScript

Extending Javascript prototypes

Browsers have varying support for different features in javascript, some support more functions, others support less. I'm not going to be so crass as to name names here but if we wanted to use Array.prototype.find we'd have problems on a certain browser from Redmond[

SQL

Querying by relative dates and times in SQL

Wanting to search for database records within a timeframe is relatively common, particularly if we want to examine error logs. How we search can make a large difference. The two queries below search for the same set of records in the same table but the first query has the potential

jQuery

Introducing jQuery.dirty

Having previously blogged about checking if a form has been modified I needed something slightly different I came across dirrty, a jQuery plugin by Ruben Torres that I personally found to have a cleaner implementation than the dirtyFields I previously wrote about. For instance, to check if a form has

C#

.NET Framework 4.6.2 released

The .NET Framework has been updated to 4.6.2 (full announcement here) and it has one feature that is definitely worth shouting from the rooftops about. In this release, we extended the CLR debugging APIs to enable the debugger to request more information and perform additional analysis when a

C#

Calling Async code from sync method

Update: C#7.1 and .NET Core 2.0 both now support async Main methods! Async code is awesome, that's just science. But when you introduce it to a codebase it tends to bubble all the way back up to your entry point If you're calling

.NET Core

Configuring an ASP.NET Core MVC Application

Following on from my post on how to upgrade an ASP.NET 5 application to .NET Core, here's how to configure it. By default a .NET Core web application will listen on port 5000 and will run it as a production environment. We may want to run two

.NET Core

Upgrading from ASP.NET 5 RC1 to ASP.NET Core RC2

ASP.NET 5 is dead. Long live .NET Core! ASP.NET 5 has been through more than a name change. dnvm, dnu and dnx are gone, all replaced with a single dotnet command. There are a number of new ideas, one of the most immediate being that all .NET Core