Low Code Life

Multiple Monitors in Remote Desktop with Windows 7 Pro

The Best Laid Plans…

I’ve recently transitioned from working at home to working on-site at a client. The client did a great job of provisioning a nice desktop PC and large dual monitors. But one of the things I missed from my home office was my standing desk. To remedy this, I planned to bring in my laptop, set it up on a stand, and re-purpose one of the two monitors they provided so I could use Remote Desktop to connect to the desktop PC and still enjoy dual monitors…but there was a small wrinkle in my plan.

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Community Megaphone and a Post-INETA Future

As I noted a few months ago, INETA North America is ceasing operations and wrapping up loose ends. As part of that wrap-up, the INETA board asked if I would be willing to help with community continuity through the website I created, Community Megaphone. The idea was for INETA to encourage folks on their mailing list to join a list I set up to discuss the future of Community Megaphone, and what kinds of features might help fill some of the gaps left behind by the end of INETA North America.

With this post, I’d also like to offer others in the developer community the same opportunity. You can join the mailing list, which is for the purpose of providing ongoing updates on the future plans for Community Megaphone. And if you don’t want to join a mailing list, but still want to provide feedback or ideas on features that would be useful for user group leaders, speakers, and attendees of developer community events, you can do so on the Community Megaphone Uservoice page, or the Feedback page on the Community Megaphone site.

I’m looking forward to the feedback of the community, and finding better ways to serve the developer community, and I hope you’ll share your feedback, too.

Learn You Node with VS Code

Node.js may not be the “new” hotness, but it’s still pretty hot, and getting hotter all the time. Whether you’re a .NET developer who’s still on the fence about JavaScript, or just haven’t gotten around to taking a look at Node, now is a pretty good time to do so, and in this post, I’ll show you a nice combination of tools that make learning Node easy and fun, namely nodeschool.io and the new Visual Studio Code editor.

What is Node.js?

On the off chance that you’ve found your way here, but don’t know what Node.js is, Node.js (sometimes referred to simply as Node) is an execution environment for JavaScript code, based on the V8 JavaScript runtime from Chrome. It’s designed to be fast, lightweight, and efficient. You can use node to write server applications in JavaScript, from real-time chat apps, to web APIs, to full web applications. While Node itself is pretty simple, with a [limited, but want another word] API set, it ships with NPM, the node package manager, which provides a fast and easy way to install packages, which are collections of functionality wrapped up in such a way as to make them easy to add to your Node projects. Node packages are available to facilitate all kinds of applications, including MVC-style routing engines, template engines, unit testing and more.

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Of Developers and Dress Codes

From a posting by one of the folks I follow on Twitter (a former Microsoft co-worker), I saw this Business Insider story on HP apparently banning t-shirts (and other casual clothing) for certain teams within the company. The story asserts that “employees are furious.” The stated reasoning, which seems sensible enough to me, is that the company does not wish to risk customers being “put off” (BI’s words) by employees who are poorly or casually dressed.

Furious?

Of course, much of the fury is almost certainly overblown by the original story in an attempt to generate traffic, so probably best to take it with a grain of salt for a slow news day.

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The New Shiny: Is Visual Studio Code for You?

UPDATE: As of November 18th, Visual Studio Code has gone Beta, and been released as open source. If you want to check out the source, or contribute, you can find the repo at:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

The beta release also adds support for extensions as well as many other new features. The full update list is here.

A day doesn’t go by lately without some new shiny toy being released for software developers to play with. A big challenge is deciding whether the new hotness is something you need to invest time in learning and using, or if it’s OK to let this particular popularity train pass you by. The recent release of the lightweight Visual Studio Code editor is no exception.

In this post, I’m going to help you make that decision, by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of this new tool. I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone for whom the full Visual Studio environment (Visual Studio 2013 Community, and sometimes Ultimate, depending on the project) is my day-to-day development tool of choice, so take that into account as you read.

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Migrating from Orchard CMS to WordPress using Windows Live Writer

For the last 4 years or so, I’ve been hosting my blog/site using Orchard CMS. Orchard has been a pretty good platform. It offers a great deal of customization and extensibility points, and for .NET developers it can be a nice place to start for building an application. Unfortunately, whether because of my own customizations or some other reason, I ended up stuck on an older version of Orchard, and despite many hours of trying, could not get the site updated to a newer version. So I decided to move the site to the WordPress platform. Continue reading Migrating from Orchard CMS to WordPress using Windows Live Writer

RSS Feed Updated

Just a quick heads-up for folks who have subscribed to my blog’s feed via my old Feedburner URL…I recently moved my blog to a new hosting platform, and in the process I have decided to discontinue the use of Feedburner for my feed. If you wish to continue receiving updates via RSS, please change your feed reader subscription to point to https://devhammer.net/feed/. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Sometimes it’s the Simple Things

Hi, my name is Andrew, and I have a problem. I sometimes overthink things…just a bit. If you share that tendency you may, like me, instinctively greet any issue you run into as an opportunity for deep analysis and troubleshooting, which may not always be the place to start.

Overthinking in Action

A case in point. I’ve been working on a project that uses Crystal Reports (yes, plenty of people still use that) in an ASP.NET Web Forms app to generate reports for a non-profit. I was tasked with creating several new reports, which was a pretty straightforward task, and seemed to be going smoothly, when I went to test the PDF version of a given report and the report viewer simply returned a bunch of gobbledygook text in the browser.

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The End of An Era – INETA Shutting Down

[Update – I will likely continue to update this post periodically to include names and facts that I, in my imperfect memory, did not originally include, as they are brought to my attention or I find them through other posts. Please drop me a note if you know someone who deserves credit here that I missed. Thanks!]

I received an email this morning announcing that INETA, after more than a decade of supporting .NET user groups, sponsoring speakers for those groups, and more, will be ceasing operations at the end of 2015.

INETA was started back in the early 2000s, at the outset of the .NET developer community, as an organization to foster community-led user groups, and help them grow. It was also instrumental in the career growth of many folks in the community, myself included. The founding board members of INETA were Bill Evjen, Keith Pleas, Dave Noderer, Keith Franklin and Brian Loesgen. [Thanks to Julie Lerman for helping refresh my memory on the history of INETA’s founding]

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Microsoft Maniacs – Zero To Web – Slides and Code

Last night, I had the opportunity to present to the Microsoft Maniacs meetup in Sterling, VA. I want to thank everyone who attended, and share my slides and code. The slides are embedded above, and also included in the Github repo for my presentation, which is linked below.

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