Many corporate machines arrive in engineers hands with a preponderance of pre-installed background tools; from virus checkers to backup utilities to port blockers; the list is long.

Devcontainers are cool. They are the infrastructure as code equivalent for developing software.

This post differs from my typical fayre. Most often I write "here's how to do a thing". This is not that. It's more "don't do this thing I did". And maybe also, "how can we avoid a situation like this happening again in future?". On this topic I very much don't have all the answers - but by putting my thoughts down maybe I'll learn and maybe others will educate me. I would love that!

Updated 2nd Oct 2020: for an approach that works with Autofac 6 and ConfigureTestContainer see this post.

The tremendous Tanner Linsley recently released react-virtual. react-virtual provides "hooks for virtualizing scrollable elements in React".

This last four months has been quite the departure for me. Most typically I find myself building applications; for this last period of time I've been taking the platform that I work on, and been migrating it from running on our on premise servers to running in the cloud.

When you are building any kind of application it's typical to want to store information which persists beyond a single user session. Sometimes that will be information that you'll want to live in some kind of centralised database, but not always.

This is a post about having two kinds of authentication working at the same time in ASP.Net Core. But choosing which authentication method to use dynamically at runtime; based upon the criteria of your choice.

JavaScript is famously single threaded. However, if you're developing for the web, you may well know that this is not quite accurate. There are Web Workers:

A worker is an object created using a constructor (e.g. Worker()) that runs a named JavaScript file — this file contains the code that will run in the worker thread; workers run in another global context that is different from the current window.

If you're using Vite to build your React app, you may prefer to read this post.

Progressive Web Apps are a (terribly named) wonderful idea. You can build an app once using web technologies which serves all devices and form factors. It can be accessible over the web, but also surface on the home screen of your Android / iOS device. That app can work offline, have a splash screen when it launches and have notifications too.

Update: 26/01/2020 - LICENSE to kill revoked!​

Just recently my team took on the challenge of upgrading our codebase from .NET Core 2.2 to .NET Core 3.1. Along the way we encountered a quirky issue which caused us much befuddlement. Should you be befuddled too, then maybe this can help you.

Teams notifications are mighty useful. You can send them using Markdown via a webhook.

This post is a a little different from most that sit on my site. It's the story of the Definitely Typed project, of which I was an early member. It had a seismic impact on the development of TypeScript. When exchanging messages with Andrew Branch (member of the TypeScipt team), I realised it was an untold story, and perhaps I should tell it, before I forget! So I did, and this is it.

I named it "Definitely Typed: The Movie" as the name entertained me. Little did I know, that a few years later, a documentary would be made about TypeScript, and I'd be in it; in part thanks to writing this history. You can see more about that here.

For now, back to Definitely Typed...

With TypeScript 3.4, a new behaviour landed and a magical new file type appeared; .tsbuildinfo

A long time ago (well, 2012) in a galaxy far, far away (okay; Plovdiv, Bulgaria)....

I did ponder calling this post "how to enable a good TypeScript developer experience for npm modules that aren't written in TypeScript"... Not exactly pithy though.

This post demonstrates how you can hard code user authentication claims in ASP.NET Core; a useful technique to facilate testing during development.

The fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin has, since its inception, performed two classes of checking:

Yarn PnP is an innovation by the Yarn team designed to speed up module resolution by node. To quote the (excellent) docs: