How to migrate CallContext to .NETStandard and .NETCore
If you need to flow data out of band like CallContext did in .NET, here's how in the new world.
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Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.
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Developer Command Prompt in Visual Studio Code Integrated Terminal
Just add the following two settings via File | Preferences | Settings: [Read More] -
Leveraging Azure Functions for MIT AppInventor Web Interactions
The MIT AppInventor platform is awesome to teach kids programming concepts while building an actual Android app. Interacting with the web is super painful, however, and Azure Functions can provide the missing link. [Read More] -
How to nuke the Visual Studio MEF component model cache from an MSI
A quick search on the web for InvalidMEFCacheException will yield quite a few results. If you have faced it, you know it’s annoying like hell. [Read More] -
Access Git Information from MSBuild and Code
Leveraging Git information can be quite useful for generating version numbers, logging information at runtime, embedding it in assemblies and so on. Here's one way to do it easily and in a cross-platform way. [Read More] -
Xamarin Mac Build Host Versioning
Before I eventually get to the protocol layer underlying the new build host in Xamarin 4 (as promissed in a previous post that introducing it, I wanted to mention how we architected it from the get go for a key scenario that we’ll want to enable in the future: side-by-side (SxS) versioning. [Read More] -
XBuild Achilles Heels
Invariably, every time I complain about XBuild, some long-time user of it tells me it’s not so bad and it actually works pretty fine if you know its limitations. So I set out to document those, since in my experience, they are so many as to cause beautifully and carefully crafted MSBuild targets to become an entanglement of obsolete elements for the sake of satisfying XBuild (i.e. usage of CreateProperty and CreateItem tasks, when declarative items and property groups are perfect in MSBuild). [Read More] -
Open Source is never Abandonware
Back in the day, friend Scott Hanselman used Schematron as an example of abandoware. That ends today, thanks to the community, as it should. [Read More] -
How to enable Xamarin.Forms XAML Intellisense in VS 2015 Update 1
As explained in XML vs XAML intellisense section of my blog post, Xamarin 4 ships with an XML-based intellisense for Xamarin.Forms we wrote from scratch. We have worked with Microsoft to make it possible to use the excelent built-in XAML language service instead, which knows about XAML’s specifics, and is driven by metadata provided by the Xamarin.Forms library. [Read More] -
How to get the item type or build action of a file in a project
Sounds like it should be pretty easy, getting the item type (shown in Visual Studio as the build action) of an arbitrary file given its containing project identifier. Yeah, right... [Read More]