

List all Transitive Dependencies in your .Net Core Project
Sometimes you need to find out what packages a .Net Core project or solution depends on quickly and whilst you can find this information in the Visual Studio IDE or by opening the project files individually and reading them, there is a quick and easy way using the “dotnet list package” command. What’s more you can also list the packages…

Support multiple JS module formats with rollup
Having recently needed to produce a shared JavaScript npm package for internal sharing of functionality between applications I naively failed to consider the impact of the various competing module formats at large in the JS world, but luckily the solution is straight forward with the help of ‘rollup’. The requirement was to make a shared JavaScript library to be shared…

Window is undefined during SSR
If when server side rendering a React application (other JS frameworks are available) that makes use of the global window object during the initial render, or perhaps the global document object, then you may get…
Keep reading
NodeJS & HTTP Error 431
I recently found error responses from a Node JS microservice with HTTP error “431 Request Header Fields Too Large” but at first it seemed to be intermittent dependent on the test environment being used. Further…
Keep reading
Coding in Spectrum Basic Again
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (16k) with rubber keys which is an icon of the innovative 1980’s micro computer market. On it I learned to code in Sinclair Basic either by reading…
Keep reading
Add Git Bash & VS Dev Cmd Prompt Profiles to Windows Terminal
I admit I was not too impressed with the early beta versions of Windows Terminal, maybe because I use Cmder as my daily terminal driver and its features are excellent. However since Windows Terminal reached…
Keep reading
VS Code Keyboard Mappings in VS 2019
Quick post to let you and ‘future me’ know that Visual Studio 2019 includes the option to use VS Code keyboard mappings out of the box. As someone who has been using VS Code as…
Keep reading
Referencing External Controllers in ASP.Net Core 3.x
I recently had a situation where I needed to include a utility controller and set of operations into every .Net Core Web API that used a common in-house framework. The idea being that by baking…
Keep reading
Creating Linux Desktop Shortcuts
In the previous post about how to hibernate your Ubuntu machine I touched on the concept of creating a desktop shortcut for the hibernate command to make it easy to run the command. That post…
Keep reading
Enabling Hibernate on Ubuntu
Personally I prefer to hibernate all my machines instead of shut them down as I find it more efficient being able to carry on from where I left off than to start a fresh. One…
Keep reading
Ubuntu Intermittent Freezing Fixed with Swappiness
Having run Ubuntu on my Dell XPS 14z for years I have been increasingly plagued by an intermittent freezing problem which causes the UI to freeze (mouse still movable) for anything from 5 to 30…
Keep reading
Moving Sonar Rules closer to the Developer with ESLint
Shift code quality analysis to the left by moving your static analysis from the CI/CD pipeline to the developers IDE where possible. In this post I cover what we did, how to set up Sonar…
Keep reading
Auto increment build number in a JavaScript app
Whilst looking a simple way to auto increment an application build version number for a small React JavaScript application I found a neat solution so I’m sharing it here for others to use (and for…
Keep reading
Java keystore certificate missing after Jenkins upgrade
Following a tricky upgrade to a Jenkins server it was found that the server was no longer able to communicate with the Git server, although SSH access with private keys was stil working correctly. On…
Keep reading
Current Podcast Recommendations
As someone with a long commute I find Podcasts a great way of keeping up to date with technology (as well as other things) and it helps me feel that my commute time is not…
Keep reading
Jenkins: Script not permitted to use method signature
I’ve recently ran into an error in a Jenkins CI/CD pipeline when using java.util.Date objects in my Groovy script pipeline and so I’d thought I’d share the problem and workaround. Problem In order to create…
Keep reading
Free SSL encryption on Azure with Cloudflare
I have a small Web Application site (running ASP.net Core) hosted on Microsoft Azure under a shared plan. Azure shared plans are budget friendly whilst providing features like custom domain names. Until recently the site…
Keep reading
Build warnings & .Net Standard dependencies
Having recently migrated a Windows Azure hosted .Net Framework ASP.net MVC 5 web application over to ASP.net Core (v2.2) I hit a few issues so I’m documenting them here for my future self and anyone…
Keep reading
IIS Express Launch Script
Usually during web development you want to run your web code locally via a local development web server and there are many options for this. In fact most development workflows provide this functionality. For example…
Keep reading
Break your site out of Internet Explorer Compatibility View
Internet Explorer Compatibility mode is a feature of IE that allows you to choose to render sites that targeted older versions of IE when they were developed. It essentially pretends to be IE 8 during…
Keep reading
Some Recommended VS Code Extensions
One of the things that makes Visual Studio Code (VSCode) such a great editor is the many extensions that have been built for it. Extensions in VSCode are explained here. As a reference for myself…
Keep reading
Razor Pages Fixes to Tag Helpers Issues
Recently when adding Razor Pages to an existing ASP.net Core MVC web application I had issues with the Tag Helpers not working. No markup was being produced. Not only were the tag helpers (i.e. asp-for)…
Keep reading
Moving teams to Trunk Based Development (an example)
In this post I am going to cover an example case study of introducing Trunk Based development to an existing enterprise Dev team building a monolithic web application. I’m not going to cover the details…
Keep reading
RunAs Issue? Check Secondary Logon Service.
On Windows if you are having problems trying to perform an action as a different user via the RunAs command then it might be due to the ‘Secondary Logon Service’ not running. I recently had…
Keep reading
SonarQube migration issue- Jenkins Using old URL
I recently migrated a SonarQube server from one server to another in order to scale out the service to our dev team. All went well until builds failed due to them looking at both the…
Keep reading
Visual Studio 2019 Offline Installer
Microsoft have now released Visual Studio 2019 and like VS2017 there is no offline installer provided by Microsoft, but you can generate one by using the web installer setup program to write all the packages…
Keep reading
Easy Upgrade Tool For NPM on Windows
Having recently needed to upgrade my version of NPM on a Windows machine, without upgrading my Node.js installation, I came across this excellent tool for doing just that without following a complex set of steps.…
Keep reading
New WP Code Snippet Editor Online Tool
You can now get the benefits of my Live Writer plugin in your browser without using Live Writer. Use WordPress…..? Post code snippets….? Well now you can customise the look and feel of the snippets…
Keep reading
Cheap Azure Hosting via Static Web Sites
Something that is pretty cool and not that well known is that you can now host your static web site in the cloud with Microsoft Azure just from your Azure storage account. The functionality is…
Keep reading
Linux Home Server Build
On this blog I have posted many times about my home server configuration and seeing as I’ve recently updated it I thought I’d give a quick overview of the changes made and provide some tips…
Keep reading
Developer Roadmaps
Something that’s proving popular on Medium these days are “development roadmaps” that outline a roadmap approach to choosing techniques and technologies for certain technical domains (for example Web development or Dev Ops). Some of these…
Keep reading
Cmder – A Better Windows Console
Whilst Linux treats console users as first rate citizens and provides many useful and powerful terminal emulators Windows has always lagged behind. This is evermore noticeable now that many developer and IT Ops workloads are…
Keep reading
Useful Git Training Links
Having recently had to compile a list of useful learning resources for a development team migrating to git, I thought I would share them here. Git is a very powerful and versatile distributed source control…
Keep reading
Consume JSON REST Service via WCF Message Class
Since WCF was designed and envisioned by Microsoft the world has changed and the use of RESTful JSON based web services has increased at the expense of SOAP based services. WCF was updated to reflect…
Keep reading
Vertical Monitors
Whilst I’ve been using a multiple monitor setup at home and work for many years only for the past year have I been using one of the two in vertical/portrait mode, and I’m hooked. The…
Keep reading
SonarQube: Unit Test Results Not Shown
Recently whilst building Jenkins CI pipeline, with SonarQube static analysis, the JUnit unit test results were not being included in the Sonar dashboard results. The Jacoco based test coverage results were being included fine but…
Keep reading
A Custom JSF Tag Lib For Toggling Render of Child Elements
I’ve added a new sample project on GitHub that shows a custom Tag Library for JSF (Java Server Faces) that can be used to show/hide its children. There are several uses for this sort…
Keep reading
Create New MSTest Projects for Pre .Net 4.5 in Visual Studio 2017
This post outlines the steps to create a new unit test project in Visual Studio 2017 using MS Test V1 and that targets .Net Frameworks prior to .Net 4.5. Visual Studio 2017 onwards only has…
Keep reading
Find assemblies loaded during debugging in Visual Studio
Sometimes you may get the following error when you are debugging a .Net app in Visual Studio: “The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.” Or you may…
Keep reading
Platform Targeting in .Net
If you see one of the errors below within your .Net application it is likely as a result of your assembly having been compiled with the wrong target architecture flag set. 1) In this instance…
Keep reading
Calculate a file hash without 3rd party tools on Windows & Linux.
If you need to generate a hash of a file (e.g. MD5, SHA256 etc) then there are numerous 3rd party tools that you can download but if you are restricted to only built in tools…
Keep reading
Speed up a slow JSF XHTML editing experience in Eclipse or IBM RAD/RSA.
If you find yourself doing some JSF (Java Server Faces) development within either Eclipse, IBM’s RAD (Rapid Application Developer) or IBM RSA (Rational Software Architect) IDEs you may find that the JSF editor can run…
Keep reading
Building a Python Flask Web UI For Raspberry Pi Sure Elec LCD
In an earlier post I outlined how I setup a Sure Electronics LCD screen with my Raspberry Pi 3 using a Python driver. Whilst updating the LCD via command line is immensely useful I decided…
Keep reading
Using a Sure Electronics LCD with the Raspberry Pi using Python
After receiving a new Raspberry Pi 3 at Christmas I quickly set off looking for uses for this wonderful machine, and quickly found myself hooking it up to an LCD display. This post covers the…
Keep reading
Archiving Adobe Lightroom Back Ups with PowerShell
If you are an Adobe Lightroom user it is critical to have regular backups of your photo library catalogue. Luckily this is a simple task thanks to the fact that Lightroom has features built in…
Keep reading
Some SonarQube Upgrade Issues & Fixes
I recently upgraded a SonarQube server installation from v5.6.2 to v6, and unfortunately hit a few issues along the way which I thought I’d share here in case others experiences the same issues. All were…
Keep reading
Using PowerShell for your VS Code Integrated Terminal
Microsoft’s superb Visual Studio Code editor has an integrated terminal which is accessed via the ‘View’menu or via the Ctrl+’ shortcut keys. On Windows by default the terminal used is the Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe)…
Keep reading
Interactive file reading with Powershell
Sometimes you want to see the contents of text file whilst it is still being updated, a common example is where you are outputting to a log file and need to see the output interactively…
Keep reading
Useful React.JS Learning Resources
Below are some links that you might find useful for learning React.js and Flux, Facebook’s successful JavaScript UI framework. There are a lot of resources out there but here are some of the best that…
Keep reading
Break on Exceptions in Visual Studio 2015
Looking for the option to break on exceptions during debugging in Microsoft Visual Studio 2015? Well Microsoft dumped the old exceptions dialog and replaced it with the new Exception Settings Window. To see it to show that…
Keep reading
Disable Start Menu Web Search in Windows 10
If like me you like the Windows 10 “start” menu to only provide applications and Windows settings in the search results and not web search results you need to configure it using these steps. Using…
Keep reading
Allow PowerShell Execution
By default PowerShell’s execution policy is very restrictive which is a good thing for security. If you are editing or running scripts on your machine you may want to relax it slightly. As I often…
Keep reading
NPM config for web access via a proxy
If you are using NPM for to install your JavaScript modules and you are sitting behind a corporate proxy server with a strict firewall then you will likely be having problems. If NPM cannot find…
Keep reading
My Current Podcast Picks
I like to make the most of my two hour commute and see this time as study time and an opportunity to learn new stuff. Every few years I list my current podcast picks on…
Keep reading
Refreshing the Nexus 7
Google’s Nexus 7 table caused quite a stir when it was released in 2012 with its low price combined with the excellent specifications it offered. It proved very popular and rightly so. Fast forward to…
Keep readingSuccinctly Excellent Free Technical E-Books
There are a lot of free ebooks covering technical subjects, and there are a lot of ebooks that have excellent content however finding some with both attributes can be hard. Syncfusion have a collection of…
Keep reading
OpenLiveWriter Version Of Syntax Highlighter Plugin Available Now
In case you hadn’t heard the excellent Windows Live Writer has gone Open Source and is being kept alive by the community. It’s now called OpenLiveWriter. This is great news as it is a really…
Keep reading
Setting HTTP Headers in Java Server Faces (JSF)
In my last post I discussed using HTTP headers to control browser caching of sensitive data. The post can be found here. The examples provided in that post were all ASP.Net and so I thought…
Keep reading
Preventing Browser Caching using HTTP Headers
Many developers consider the use of HTTPS on a site enough security for a user’s data, however one area often overlooked is the caching of your sites pages by the users browser. By default (for…
Keep reading
Upgrading MVC 3 to MVC 4 via NuGet
I had to upgrade an old ASP.NET MVC 3 project to MVC 4 yesterday and whilst searching for the official instructions I found that there is a NuGet package that does all the hard work…
Keep reading
Backing Up Your Blog Content Using HTTrack
I’m pretty strict on making sure I have my data backed up in numerous places and my blog content is no different. I would hate to lose all these years of babbling. In this post…
Keep readingAdding a Return Message in an RSA Sequence Diagram
Here’s a quick tip that I found useful last week. If you’re using IBM Rational Software Architect to produce a UML Sequence diagram and you add a new Synchronous Message activity the tool automatically inserts…
Keep readingLoading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Use the search form to search the site.