Tab selects text instead of indenting in Visual Studio
I ran into an annoying phenomena today when I tried indenting some multi-line expression I had in my code. I pressed TAB but instead of indenting, it selecte...
Software-Development
Invoking arbitrary PowerShell commands with retries in PowerShell
Yesterday I blogged about a function I created to execute arbitrary shell (cmd) commands in PowerShell, with retries in face of failures. But what if the com...
Invoking arbitrary shell (cmd) commands with retries in PowerShell
EDIT– I initially tried to support execution of PowerShell scripts, functions, and cmdlets in the code below. However, it turns out that they behave too diff...
Redirecting all URLs to their HTTPS WWW equivalents
Whether you’re a no-www or a yes-www person (you can guess which one I am based on the URL currently present on your address bar 🙂), one thing is certain – y...
Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library
I was recently writing a mono application for OSX in MonoDevelop, using Gtk# as the GUI framework. The app seemed to work fine, but it would throw the follow...
In C++, even a thread is not thread-safe (or: why you should use tasks part 2)
Consider the following (contrived) code:
The case of the crashing std::thread destructor and why you should use tasks instead of threads
I recently encountered an interesting crash in our iOS application at work. Here’s the relevant stack trace section:
Posting forms with Knockout to dynamic Sammy routes
Single-page applications (SPAs) are the standard these days, and two aspects are typically considered for their development:
Static definitions in header files may cause malloc errors on application teardown
I recently encountered the following error in the shutdown procedure of XCTest (we’re using Kiwi which is based on it):
Debugging unobserved concurrency runtime task exceptions
The C++ Concurrency runtime (AKA PPLX) is the unmanaged answer to the Task Parallel Library (TPL), and it works surprisingly well. It is even cross platform ...
Should you use std::string, std::u16string, or std::u32string?
C++11 introduced a couple of new string classes on top of std::string:
Some WinDbg tips
I’ve gathered some WinDbg tips over time (mostly for managed dump analysis) and this seems like as good a place as any to share them, so here you go.
Getting started with ETW using .NET’s EventSource
.NET 4.5 introduced the EventSource class, allowing convenient access to Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) from managed code. This is a boon for enterprise dev...
Controlling the physical storage location of the Azure Storage Emulator
The Azure Storage Emulator is a very convenient tool for working against mocked Azure Storage services – blobs, queues and tables. However, it appears to hav...
Obtaining old Mono and MonoDevelop Mac versions
I was recently looking for old Mono and MonoDevelop Mac versions and realised they weren’t trivial to find. So for the benefit of all mankind, here are the l...
Getting spinner gifs from a CDN
Using animated gifs for spinner / loader animation can be quite convenient, and sites such as AjaxLoad allow you to create them to your liking. However, bein...
The Windows API Code Pack – the case of the missing samples
The Windows API Code Pack can be a boon for managed code developers wanting to access Windows functionality such as the TaskBar, Windows Shell, DirectX, Aero...
Creating managed wrappers for COM interfaces
COM interop can be a very useful tool, but it requires the definitions of the unmanaged interfaces one wants to use. This may be a little tricky, so here&...
Don’t let Work Guy screw Home Guy over
A great man once said:
Measuring on-screen pixels
There are times when measuring pixels on-screen may be useful. This is especially true when following redline specifications (just make sure your browser zoo...
Mapping network resources to local files using Fiddler
In web development, it is sometimes useful to alter files locally on the client (browser) side and test their behavior.
Programmatically launching Visual Studio with parameters
In the group where I work, we don’t open Visual Studio (VS) solutions by double-clicking on them in Windows explorer, rather we have a special command-line l...
Working with the new SourceForge svn+ssh protocol in Windows
I’ve been using TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN for quite some time with SourceForge. Both have been working flawlessly. However, SF recently updated their SVN syste...
Adding syntax highlighting for new languages to Eclipse with the Colorer library
Say you have an HRC file containing the syntax and lexical structure of some programming language Eclipse does not support (for example D).