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Home Automation Cookbook collects practical patterns for making a home helpful without making it harder to use. I have written about home automation on this blog for years. In 2019, I published a collection of home automation ideas that worked well for my family. The important part was never a part...

When several Visual Studio instances are open, identifying the right one becomes a surprisingly repetitive task. Two windows showing different checkouts of the same solution can look almost identical. Reading the title works, but a small visual cue is easier to spot. That's the problem behind Solut...

Lore is a new source control system from Epic Games. It is designed for fast, distributed workflows, with local repositories that work offline and optional Lore servers when you need to collaborate. Lore for Visual Studio brings that workflow directly into the IDE. It is also a practical example of...

Line length is one of those conventions that teams agree on easily and enforce inconsistently. EditorConfig gives us a shared vocabulary with max_line_length, but Visual Studio does not natively draw a boundary for it or apply it during formatting. That gap is what inspired Max Line Length. The ext...

Visual Studio bookmarks are useful for marking a line and returning to it later. The problem is that a line number alone does not say why the location matters, how it relates to other locations, or whether the rest of the team should know about it. Bookmark Studio treats a bookmark as a small piece ...

Turning a code sample into an image sounds simple until the image needs to look like the code inside Visual Studio. Copying text into a design tool loses editor colors and formatting. Taking a normal screen capture includes tabs, margins, toolbars, and whatever else happens to be visible. It also l...

Let me take you back to a moment that might feel familiar: you’re staring at a JSON configuration file, wrestling with field names and structure, hoping you’ve gotten it right. Your IDE is offering no help, and documentation is scattered or nonexistent. Frustrating, right? Years ago, I f...

At our house, we use home automation for a lot of different things. One of them is the ability to get a quick overview of the state of our appliances such as the washer, dryer and dishwasher. That way we don’t accidentally forget to turn over the laundry or empty the dishwasher. A red tile on our ...

After showing some pictures of our smart home dashboard, questions started coming in about the cables going in behind the books. Where is the modem and what else is going on? Spoiler alert, the books are fake. Here you see a couple of cables going in behind the books on the top shelve. Removing...

I’ve had some questions lately about how we keep track of all the home automation devices spread across the house. So, I thought I’d share how our dashboard is set up. The dashboard is the web-based SharpTools that runs in Fully Kiosk Browser on an Amazon Fire Tablet HD 10 which is magnetically atta...

Hey! It’s been a few years since I last blogged here! Let’s get this blog thing back in action, starting with something non-technical that I’ve had a few requests for – my story of two years of daily exercise. Happy New Year! Today’s a day where half the world contempla...

It’s a new year! Even though years are an arbitrary construct and all that, you feel reinvigorated! Alive! Ready to take on the world! And you’ve read all those posts and tweets and instatumblrs about blogging! They’re pretty compelling, really, and you’re in a suggestible st...

If you’ve ever created an MSDeploy web package using Visual Studio you may have noticed that the generated package has the folder structure of where the application was packaged. Since MSDeploy parameters are used when installing the package in most cases the structure of the web package doesn’t mat...

Have you ever wanted to view MSBuild log files in Markdown format? If you are using psbuild then you’ll now get this feature for free if you upgrade your install. psbuild is a PowerShell wrapper for msbuild.exe. You can learn more about it on the github page or my previous blog post on it.   Us...

OK, so this off topic, but its so important that I had to blog about this. Let me give you some background. Last week I was traveling with my family on a road trip to Canada. Usually I’m super paranoid and never connect to any open wireless network (I pay for an carry my own mi-fi device due to this...

I'm really excited to announce that two of my latest courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy are now live! Both are recordings of live courses Christopher Harrison and I lead in the beautiful Channel 9 studios, and include downloads of all slides, code and live chat logs. These are live events with tw...

For the latest info here and for discussion please visit https://github.com/sayedihashimi/slow-cheetah/issues/158.   I first developed SlowCheetah around VS2010 SP2 with the idea that I could at some point transition this to the appropriate team(s) at Microsoft. Unfortunately I haven't been abl...

A few weeks ago Mads Kristensen and I created a few site extensions for Azure Web Sites which the Azure Image Optimizer and Azure Minifier. These extensions can be used to automatically optimize all images on a site, and minify all .js/.css files respectively. These are shipped as nuget packages in ...

For the past few months I’ve been working on a project I’m calling PSBuild. It’s an open source project on GitHub which makes the experience of calling MSBuild from PowerShell better. Getting started with PSBuild is really easy. You can install it in one line.(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadStrin...

Web devs in southern California, we've got a great Web Camp event coming up next week in Los Angeles on July 9. We're wrapping up the Summer Web Camps tour I announced a bit ago with a blowout! This is a free, one day event and we've got space available in the fancy new Microsoft Playa Vista office....

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