Fluent stories of a software engineer
I cought a tweet a few days ago asking for your developers toolbelt, specifically on windows. And I gave a very short answer and mentioned I would blog about this:
@modocache @devlead vs code & Atom. Cmder. Outlook. Actually, wait a bit and I'll blog my toolbelt 😉
— Sebastian PR Gingter (@PhoenixHawk) December 8, 2016
So, this is a more elaborate answer to the developers toolbelt question. My default windows developer installation contains the following:
"Can you run Bash in Cmder?" - In the comments of my last post (install and run (Oh-my-) zsh on Bash on Ubuntu on Windows), I was asked whether it would be possible to run the Bash (or Zsh) also in Cmder. First I thought it was not possible, but then I got curious. After digging in a bit more it turned out that it IS, in fact, possible. And it's not difficult too.
So, since I figured out how it works, I also want to show you how you can run the Windows 10 Ubuntu Bash (and/or Zsh) in Cmder.
Continue reading "Running Windows 10 Ubuntu Bash in Cmder"
I run zsh on Windows. But why? Some time ago, when I was still using a Mac, one of my colleagues suggested to use zsh instead of bash.
Since then I switched to a Surface Book which I happily preferred over OS X mac OS and mainly use cmdr as my shell. Now the Windows 10 Anniversary update is out, and it comes with "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows".
Now, while having bash on my fingertips again, my colleagues' suggestion came back to my mind, and I tried to use zsh again.
Continue reading "How to install and run (Oh-My-) zsh on Windows"
After the upgrade to Windows 10 I started using Microsoft EdgeMicrosoft Edge as my main browser. Now, just a few days later, I can tell you about my first impressions.
Continue reading "Microsoft Edge – First impressions"
That may sound strange, but I'm indeed a little bit proud that yesterday evening I released my very first open source library: the SmartDev.ConfigurationMapper.
This is a small helper library designed to be used with ASP.NET 5 (currently still known as vNext). You pass in an instance of the new Microsoft.Framework.ConfigurationModel.IConfiguration type, and you can map the config keys to properties of your custom classes, to have strongly typed configuration types in your application.
It works both on Asp.Net50 as well as Asp.NetCore5.0 (new CoreCLR), and is one building block of a side project I started recently, because I struggled with the configuration system a bit.
Grab it on NuGet: http://www.nuget.org/packages/SmartDev.ConfigurationMapper, or get involved on GitHub: https://github.com/gingters/SmartDev.ConfigurationMapper!
In my recent blog post I wrote about my experiences so far with static site gens in general. I said I was looking into Hexo before I go on with my plan B and this is what I did.
Hexo is very capable. If you really just want to a blog, then this is the way to go (imho). The main problem with Hexo is that it is a one-man-show from China and that this guy is currently in the middle of the process to release Hexo 3.0. Which is not a bad thing, but for one several plugins have not yet been updated, which makes it very hard to get things running. Then again, some plugins like the sitemap plugin that should generate a sitemap.xml do not have access to all entries for the tags and the categories. That said, I could probably write my own, but while the API is documented somehow I don't got around configuring my WebStorm IDE correctly so that it indeed provides me with code completion on the Hexo API, which makes everything very tedious.
Continue reading "Static site gens the 2nd: Hexo and Sandra.Snow"
Over the course of the last weekend I tried to built a website for a side project of mine (gaming related). To broaden my horizon, and to be able to host the website cheap and fast, I wanted to use a static site generator for it.
First try: Jekyll. TL;DR: Does not work on windows.
Since Jekyll is directly supported by Github pages, and I wanted to host here, and a lot of other guys around on my Twitter timeline use Jekyll, I thought this is the way to go.
Continue reading "Ask a Ninja: Current state of static site generators"
Hi, my schedule for this years conference season is quite short.
I will be speaking at Delphi-Tage in Bonn this weekend (6th of September). My two sessions there are:
Additionally I will be speaking at EKON 18, 3rd to 5th of November in Cologne. Here I have three talks, and these are:
And maybe, just maybe, I will have a short guest-appearance at EGX London, but if that is becoming true, I will post about that separately.
I spent some time today searching for a bug. Turned out it was a nasty one.
If you have a single line of code, being there for a single purpose, you usually expect this code to work.
My case: Setting a HTTP header on a response to a normal HTTP request. One probably would think this is a normal task. I wanted to set a header to control caching. More specifically, the 'vary' header, as the result of the request is dependent upon a specific header sent with the request.
Continue reading "Why the IIS overwrites your vary-Header with ‘Accept-Encoding’"
This post is mostly as a reminder for myself, to not loose these important links again. But said that, it's probably interesting for you too, when you care about performance and the .NET behaviour around regular expressions (Regex).
In the .NET world, some things are very common. First is, you are advised to use a StringBuilder whenever you concatenate some strings. Second is: If a Regex is slow, use RegexOptions.Compiled to fix it. Well... Now, in fact there are reasons for this sort of advise. String concatenation IS slow, for various, commonly known reasons. But still a StringBuilder has some overhead and there are situations where using it imposes an unwanted overhead.
The very same goes for RegexOptions.Compiled, and Jeff Atwood, aka Coding Horror, wrote a very good article about that a few years ago: To compile or not to compile (Jeff Atwood).
In one of the comments another article from MSDN (BCL Blog) is referenced, where the different caching behaviour of Regex in .NET 1.1 vs. .NET 2.0 is explained: Regex Class Caching Changes between .NET Framework 1.1 and .NET Framework 2.0 (Josh Free).
There is only a single thing that is true for each and every kind of performance optimization. And it's the simple two words: "It depends.".
With regular expressions, the first thing any performance issue depends on is, if you really need a regular expression for the task. Of course, if you really know regular expressions, what they can do and what they can't, and for what they are the correct tool, you are very likely to not run into those kinds of problems. But when you just learned about the power of Regexes (all you have is a hammer) everything starts to look as a string desperatly waiting to get matched (everything is a nail). What I want to say is: Not everything that could be solved with a Regex also should be solved by one. Again, I have a link for me and you to keep in your Regex link collection: Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems (Jeff Atwood).
Now, finally to performance optimization links.
There is a good blog article series on the MSDN BCL Blog (like the one above) that goes very deep into how the Regex class performs in different scenarios. You find them here:
And, besides those, once again a nice article on "catastrophic backtracking" from Jeff: Regex Performance (Jeff Atwood).
There are three articles, that are not really available anymore. Three very good articles from Mike, that you can only retrieve from the wayback machine. I'm really thinking hard about providing a mirror for these articles on my blog too. But until then, here are the links: