Some of the features described in the video below sound pretty interesting but they also sounds super-complicated, with deferred-loading, hydration, signals, and event/replay all combined with decisions about whether something loads on the client or the server or whether it’s initially built on the server but then enhanced on the client and then run independently from the server, …

I understand that a lot of this technology is for optimizing large web sites, but It’s honestly questionable... [More]

The following video shows not only when and how to use calc-size(), it also mixes in advice on generating timing functions for animations, sprinkles CSS variables throughout, and even uses overflow: clip combined with an absolutely positioned element to reveal more content without disturbing the layout.

Animate and do math on things like height: auto with interpolate-size and calc-size() by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

The syntax for calc-size() is, as Kevin says, “weird”; you have to pass two parameters: the first is the name of the logical size you’d like to use, while the second parameter is a formula that... [More]

The picture and title are, as usual, clickbait-y, because apparently people don’t click on videos that sound educational unless you promise them ground-breaking learnings. Still, I don’t hate the player; I hate the game. But it’s the world we have.

The video is quite informative and is 90% not the guy pictured. Instead, it’s another guy called Gui Ferrera, who is quite competent.

The Correct Way to Run Database Migrations in EF Core by Nick Chapsas / @gui.ferreira (YouTube)

He starts by explaining how to deploy migrations in production—you don’t just run them, as you would in... [More]

No. No, I’m not.

I was briefly considering it because two good programmer friends[1] of mine asked me, and it seemed like it might be kind of fun to compare our solutions.

But … 24 days, man.

I’ve got other things to do. Like, a lot of other things to do.

I am not in any way bored or looking for things to do.

I’m not even lacking in programming projects that I could be working on.

I’m teaching a JavaScript class right now, for which I’m constantly refining the examples and project code,... [More]

A little while back, someone wrote I can’t wrap my head around MVVM (Reddit), asking for help. I answered with a short example, reproduced below.

tl;dr: Use the MVVM Toolkit and try JetBrains ReSharper or Rider for more IDE assistance for binding and fixing up views.[1]

The concept is that:

• the (M)odel describes your data in the shape you want to store it, process it, etc.
• a (V)iew describes the elements of the UI.
• a (V)iew(M)odel mediates between these two “shapes”.

Why do we need this? Why not... [More]

I watched this video analyzing a chunk of code, in the hopes of refactoring it.

Always Return Early in Your Code | Code Cop #024 by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

The original code is the laughably overblown example below.

public List<int> ProcessData(List<int> data)
{
  if (data != null)
  {
    if (data.Count > 0)
    {
      var processedData = new List<int>();
      foreach (var d in data)
      {
        processedData.Add(d * 2);
      }
      return processedData;
    }
    else
    {
      return new List<int>();
    }
  }
  else
  {
    return null;
  }
}

Nick... [More]

The article Processes and rules make code review less intimidating by Stefan Judis writes,

“Code reviews are, by nature, intimidating. Sometimes even brutal. If you’ve been in the game for long enough, you probably experienced the following: you worked hard on a feature, you’re proud of yourself and open the PR to be praised and land your changes, and then… it rains comments, suggestions and nitpicks. And if it’s really bad, you’re forced to take multiple feedback and clean-up rounds. It sucks.”

Oh, wow.
... [More]

I was working with a colleague to get the properties that have a particular attribute. The original formulation returned the properties then got the attributes again, plucking the first one off of the list and asserting that it exists to convince the compiler that everything’s OK. We know it exists because otherwise we wouldn’t have returned the property—but the computer doesn’t know that.

Ok, it works but it’s not efficient or elegant. Is there some way to build this so we allocate... [More]

I not unexpectedly very much enjoyed this somewhat-rambling 59-minute course on controlling font features from CSS. It’s really quite amazing and wonderful what you can do declaratively these days.

CSS Typography Crash Course by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

To begin, Roel Nieskens takes a long look at variable fonts, which can be manipulated via both standard CSS properties, like font-weight, as well as using font-variation-settings, all of which can be animated. Variable fonts support a much more granular range of values for font-weight than... [More]

While investigating Charts.css, I learned that you can throw unrecognized special characters like square brackets or pipes into CSS class references and its just fine. So you can use them to separate longer lists of classes. For more information, see Cube CSS: grouping by Andy Bell (Piccalilli).

So, you can write:

<article 
class="[ card ] [ section box ] [ bg-base color-primary ]">
</article>

or

<article class="card | section box | bg-base color-primary">
…
</article>

and it works just fine, while being more... [More]

In this otherwise excellent video, I found myself very much wishing that Toub had written at least a single test for the ArrayPool implementation that he built in this video. Still, check out the selected citation below to get a feeling for how they consider performance implications—there are no easy answers, there is only testing and benchmarking.

Deep .NET: Let's Build Our Own ArrayPool with Stephen Toub and Scott Hanselman by dotnet (YouTube)

At 34:45,

“Hanselmann: For folks that may not know what NUMA is: so NUMA is this non-uniform memory access that the computer knows that, like,... [More]”

The article Possible Future CSS: Tree-Counting Functions and Random Values by Roman Komarov (Kizu.Dev) is another mathematical master class in using CSS variables and calculations to get at values like “sibling count” and “sibling index”, two values that are in a future proposal for CSS Values and Units Module Level 5 (w3C).

The final demo looks like this, with randomly laid out items squared up into equal columns and rows where possible, all done with only CSS.

Stacking and squaring up grid items

Here’s a taste of the code for getting a random value in CSS,

... [More]

This isn’t a terrible video on IAsyncEnumerable but it’s also not nearly as high-level and fast-paced as I’m come to expect from the .NET Deep Dive series, which is no-muss/no-fuss with Stephen Toub. Those are much better than this one but, if you’re not grokking what IAsyncEnumerable is good for from the documentation or examples, maybe this one-hour video will help. If you’re lucky, it will make you feel better about your own skills as a programmer.

On .NET Live: Supercharge .NET with IAsyncEnumerables: Efficient Data Streams by dotnet / Chase Aucoin (YouTube)

Maybe I’m just super-smart but I can’t... [More]

.NET Aspire is a newly introduced tool for building distributed solutions that run just as easily locally as they do in the cloud. This video explains how this is a boon for integration testing.

End-to-end integration testing with .NET Aspire by dotnet / Aaron Powell (YouTube)

The concept is very nice and seems to greatly simplify building integration tests. Kudos and thanks for the introduction.

Still, my hair was standing on end with some of the “fast and loose” programming in this video, though. I know that people will argue that you have to take a direct path to get... [More]

I finally got around to verifying that the defining dependent async methods like the following one is wasteful.

public async Task<bool> N()
{
   return await M();
}

A less-contrived example looks like this:

using System.Threading.Tasks;
public class C {
    public Task<bool> M() 
    {
        return Task.FromResult(false);
    }
    
    public async Task<bool> N() 
    {
        return await M();
    }
    
    public async void RunIt()
    {
        var result = await N();
    }
}

This... [More]

Manim − linear transformation in 3dThis is a fun video that demonstrates an API, runtime, and IDE called Manim that lets you interactively build 3-D animations. It’s like a game-engine editor[1] in which you build your scenes by calling APIs in Python. There’s an interactive Python terminal, a rendering area, and a text editor.

It’s quite nicely done and he’s put it to good use over the years, building hundreds, if not thousands, of videos with it.

How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks by 3Blue1Brown (YouTube)

The API is quite high-level and robust but it’s so clear how limited the Python... [More]

The final document of What’s new in C# 13 (Microsoft Learn) is available. There are no major changes for most end users; the changes listed are interested for library and framework developers—especially those interested in writing highly performant code, e.g., Microsoft in its BCL and ASP.NET.

1. Completely unsurprisingly, the params keyword now also applies to IEnumerable<T> (as well as many descendants) as well as Span<T> and ReadOnlySpan<T>.
2. There’s now an official Lock object that, when used instead of the... [More]

The work journal 2024-03-27T16:03:51 conversation: 01ht0afgwryks5fepkvvm0kn28 by Simon Willison (GitHub) describes the author’s process of using AI prompting to write a console text-wrapping algorithm.

He prompted with “JavaScript that takes a big string of text and word wraps it at the specified width, adding newlines where necessary.” The answers meandered around a solution space that seemed over-engineered and not particularly fruitful—the answers all used regular expressions, which seems kind of like overkill, when... [More]

The article Prefer test-doubles over mocking frameworks by Steve Dunn writes,

“This is testing implementation and not behaviour. Your SUT called something and there is likely an observable side-effect of that. Test the side-effect and not that a particular method was called. If the code is refactored (e.g. you change the implementation but not the behaviour), then your test that checked that a method was called will likely break, but your test that tested the behaviour should remain unchanged and should... [More]”

The Talk − Bringing C# nullability into existing code by Maarten Balliauw is a 66-slide deck that I summarize as follows:

• The C# nullability feature is for build- and design-time. It does not enforce anything at runtime. That means that you still have to check parameters for null.
• The C# nullability feature is available to solutions working with .NET Framework and .NET.
• For .NET Framework, you have to explicitly set the <LanguageVersion> to 8.0 (however, there are a bunch of cons associated with doing this, as... [More]

Introduction

This article defines concepts like repository and working tree and then discusses how you can use .gitignore files to determine the files and folders that Git considers during operations.

Concepts

From a command line, you can run git init in any folder to make any folder a Git repository. Doing so creates a .git folder with a database and configuration files for the local repository. Git considers any folder that contains a .git folder with these configuration and database files... [More]

This is another excellent 1-hour tour of another complex corner of .NET. Toub describes and shows how the source-generated RegEx engine works.

Deep Dive into RegEx with Stephen Toub by dotnet / Scott Hanselmann (YouTube)

• The generated source is human-readable and debuggable.
• It is well-commented.
• It updates in real-time as you change the expression.
• It includes XML documentation that describes the regular expression in plain English.
• They rewrote the compiler in .NET 7 to not only better support source generators, but also to be able to emit not only IL, but source... [More]

This is another video from Stephen Toub that is just chock/full of useful information.

Writing async/await from scratch in C# with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

At 27:30, they start to discuss about the nomenclature of Task and how it differs from an Action. It’s funny that neither of them mentioned that tasks in .NET are called promises pretty much everywhere else (JavaScript, Java, etc.). Some libraries also use the word future. For more information, see Futures and promises (Wikipedia).

As he’s building everything, it is really astonishing to note that Hanselmann has to... [More]

This is a great interview with the master of performance-optimization in .NET Stephen Toub. If you’re relatively well-versed in C#, .NET, and Linq, then you can just jump to the second video (linked below). I actually watched the second one first. I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

Deep Dive on LINQ with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

Stephen Toub’s the guy who writes the 100+-page release notes on performance. See the following links.

• Performance Improvements in .NET 5 (46 pages)
• Performance Improvements in .NET 6 (109 pages)
• Performance... [More]

This video is from a great channel, which published a lot of great videos a while back. They covered pretty much everything already, but circled back to JavaScript for 2024.

Interview with Senior JS Developer 2024 by Programmers are also human (YouTube)

Some choice quotes from the video.

“We push on save.”

“2024 is the year of the serverlesslessness.”

“They say that every year, but this year they’re out of VC funding.”

“Don’t write this down, next week all of this is gonna change.”

This guy just keeps knocking it out of the park. Pretty much everything he mentioned... [More]

The following video discusses the downsides of the current implementation of primary constructors:

The C# 12 Feature You Shouldn’t Use, Yet by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

To sum up:

• Primary constructors don’t have a readonly backing field; you can still assign to it within the type.
• You can’t control the visibility of the generated property or backing field.
• You can’t throw exceptions, except in a... [More]

The article Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler makes many interesting points. It is a compendium of know-how about CI by one of the industry heavyweights, who’s been using it for a long time.

While I found a lot of what he had to say interesting, I did wonder how applicable CI is for the kinds of teams that I know and work with. He makes several statements toward that end that pretty severely limit the applicability of what he calls “true CI” for many, if not most, teams.

I think he should have started... [More]

The article The web just gets better with Interop 2024 by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog) writes,

“The Interop project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to look deeper into specific focus areas. Now, for a third year, Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla pooled our collective expertise and selected a specific subset of automated tests for 2024.

“Some of the technologies chosen have been around for a long time. Other areas are brand new. By selecting some of the highest priority... [More]”

I published a very similar version of the following article in the DevOps Wiki at Uster Technologies AG. Since nearly all of that post is general knowledge that I would have been happy to find before I started my investigations, I’m sharing it here.

Overview

When we think about navigating or debugging our code, we usually focus on the code we’ve written ourselves—local sources in our file system. IDEs have classically focused on being able to debug and navigate this code.

More and more,... [More]

The article Exploring Generative AI by Birgitta Böckeler (MartinFowler.com) is chock-full of helpful tips from eight newsletters totaling 25 pages that she wrote throughout 2023. I include some of my own thoughts, but most of this article consists of citations.

A lot of my analysis and notes boils down to: you need to know what you’re doing to use these tools. They can help you build things that you don’t understand, but it’s not for medium- or long-term solutions. I’ve written a lot more about the need for expertise in How... [More]