Build Monitor on Raspberry Pi
I’m starting a small but slightly ambitious project, around integrating several bits of technology that I’ve never had fully working together so in the spirit... Read more
# code - 100 Posts
Occasionally...
Running an Azure classic cloud service, which at the top level is a big while(true) block, one sometimes needs to run an action sometimes and... Read more
Tracing Failed IIS Requests
Today, after some frustrating debugging IIS and rewrite rules not matching what was expected, I learned that IIS can log out the match process and... Read more
ngrok
A new tool (to me) is ngrok a command line tool and online service to allow you to map an external url to a local... Read more
Microbit Ghost Detector
Just in time for Halloween, here’s a ghost detector that uses the microbit temperature sensor to sense changes in ambient temperature - which we all... Read more
Microbit Dinosaur Detector
It’s been a while since I posted a microbit sample so here’s one that would work well on the set of Jurassic Park, a dinosaur... Read more
NUnit Test Actions for Great Good
Lots of c# unit tests I see build up a set of abstract base classes to allow for things like setting up common environments and... Read more
Generating Notepaper with PdfSharp
PdfSharp is a lovely library that lets you generate/draw pdf documents programmatically. I used it to generate some notepaper and found it easy to work... Read more
Pre- and Post- Build Differences in MSBuild
Again with the large codebases. Along with many other problems, it can be difficult to see what physical binaries have been created or copied when... Read more
Lightweight Build Order Logging in MSBuild
If you have a lot of .Net code, projects and solutions to build, it can sometimes be difficult to see the order that the projects... Read more
Tiny Lisp Implementations
I wanted to mention a couple of awesome walkthroughs - one old, one newer - dealing with a subject I always find fascinating, writing interpreters... Read more
Project Euler
Project Euler Problem #1 is listing all natural numbers under 1000 and summing those divisible by 3 or 5. Kind of like a maths fizz... Read more
Refactoring Away from Static Code
A common problem with many c# codebases I see is a lot reliance on static classes and developers who say “we can’t unit test our... Read more
Spoofing Nokia mobile on the Microbit
A silly little snippet you could use with the microbit and an external speaker to make someone think there’s an old Nokia mobile phone ringing... Read more
Minecraft PortKey
What’s programming without an occasional Harry Potter/Minecraft mashup? In the Harry Potter universe, a Portkey is a magical teleportation device which is disguised as an... Read more
Minecraft Forestry
We can build very simple trees programmatically in Minecraft by stacking blocks together using wood-y and leaf-y materials. Read more
Slow Down, Red Squirrels
Another in the continuing series of requests for slowness. Read more
Perfecting Code Reviews
I first read about the Core Protocols way back in the early 2000s from Jim & Michele McCarthy’s book “Software for your head”. Read more
Visual Studio Code Snippets FTW
I think I had mostly forgotten about lots of little features in Visual Studio, like code snippets. Today I was updating some unit tests from... Read more
Minecraft's Greatest Hits
The Raspberry Pi Minecraft API has a little known function for reporting which blocks “Steve” has hit/mined as he moves around the world. Naturally enough,... Read more
Minecraft Detectorists
Another simple minecraft game, this time using Pythagoras’ theorem to work out distances between two points. Read more
It's Raining Blocks
A super simple rain simulator creates blocks at random positions in the sky and lets them fall to the ground under minecraft physics. Read more
Microbit coin flipper
Running up to a new Maker’s week at the end of July, I was getting a bit bored with the tamagotchi example that uses the... Read more
Everything has already been said...
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. André Gide Read more
Alan Kay and OOP
From an email to Stefan Ram around 2003: Read more
Tell people why
Heard on the rework podcast … Read more
Portal Theme on Microbit
One feature of the microbit I haven’t explored too much in the past was the music module. This module lets you play simple tunes using... Read more
Elementary Programming and Algol
I find it fascinating how much of what the popular programming imagination thinks of as new and exciting was already been thought of a long... Read more
Simulating Minecraft Creeper on Pi
One of the features missing from the pi version of Minecraft is the survival mode, where early on in the game you have to build... Read more
Minecraft Pi for Millionaires
If you were a millionaire, living in a minecraft-kind-of-world, I’m sure you would want to have an enormously ostentatious fish tank for your block-shaped tropical... Read more
FizzBuzz in Elixir
Here’s the result of a recent junior dev coding dojo, tackling fizz buzz in a totally new language for us - elixir. Read more
Slow Down
You periodic reminder to stop implementing code as fast as possible and slow down, maybe write a unit test or two :) Read more
Klang's Conjecture
Here’s a reason I like to teach unplugged or paper and pencil computer science concepts from the start. Read more
Microbit Mentalism
I was due to give a talk to some educators about using the BBC microbit in the computer science syllabus and was having a hard... Read more
Langton's Ant
Another example of cellular automata that I’ve only just discovered is Langton’s Ant. Read more
microbit Paparazzi Simulator
Another small bit of code, similar to blinkenlights, that turns on a random pixel then lets it fade out before turning on the next one.... Read more
On-the-fly MsBuild Task Template
I’ve written earlier about creating a custom MsBuild task in C# and building it into an assembly that we can load during a build. An... Read more
microbit Blinkenlights
A tiny snippet of code often used when the microbit is not showing anything specifically on the screen but you want to indicate that something... Read more
Setting variables in TFS builds
I am usually a big fan of Tfs and VS TFS 2015 onwards and the improvements the team made to the build system as compared... Read more
Blinking C++
Following hard on the heels of the last post, I decided to try to implement one of the other canonical examples from the MicroPython world,... Read more
Building C++ for the BBC Micro:bit
In the last 12-18 months of coding for the BBC micro:bit I tended to shy away from the block-based, Scratch-like environments and have always used... Read more
Creating Jekyll Collections
So far with this personal site, I have stuck to the bog-standard way of putting all blog post content into markdown files in the “posts”... Read more
Honest Shop
Here’s a lovely hand lettered sign from the wall of the “Honest Shop” in Coniston village, Cumbria. Read more
Hello, Pygame
Having exhausted everything there is to do with plain old Python, the Raspberry Pi, BBC micro:bit (ok, maybe not :), one area of Python that... Read more
A tiny introduction to Python unit testing
As I go deeper and deeper into Python, lead by experiments with the Microbit, I thought it was about time I experimented with some tests.... Read more
Old-Timey Twitter for the Microbit
Teaching some maker classes at campus north this week, I was showing the students how to send and receive text using the microbit’s radio API.... Read more
Old-Timey Snapchat for the Microbit
As a I mentioned in my other post from today about the microbit radio API, teaching the maker class gave me some new ideas for... Read more
Lightning Calculator for the Microbit
Ahead of a maker class I’m teaching in a week or so I’ve been thinking of what kinds of things are appropriate, easy to understand... Read more
Building a Custom PowerShell Cmdlet in C#
Over the time I’ve spent automating deployment and build processes, I have fallen out with plain command line applications and batch files. In their stead,... Read more
Minecraft Blocks Cheatsheet
There are a huge number of block types available to build through the Python API. Read more
Building a house in Minecraft
The Python API for the raspberry pi edition of Minecraft is really nice and easy to get started with. There aren’t an overwhelming number of... Read more
Hello, Minecraft
I’m going to be doing some tinkering with Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi. Specifically, writing some code to do some building using the Python interface.... Read more
Tiny Asteroids for Microbit
Asteroids is a game I used to love to play on the old Atari 2600 console. Read more
Microbit Life
Conway’s Game of Life is a programming classic used in katas, to teach TDD ideas and even features in the annual code retreat events around... Read more
Rock, Paper, Microbit
I saw a tweet from @TechForLifeUK the other day which said they were going to run a code dojo where they would be writing the... Read more
Balancing Ball - Writing a Game for the BBC Micro:bit
After getting a little more familiar with the BBC Micro:bit I decided the best way to learn something about the true capabilities of the platform... Read more
Unboxing the BBC Micro:bit
I finally got my hands on a BBC Micro:bit and have been really impressed with the user experience so far. Read more
Remembering Lost Kittens and Robots
I had been looking at some alternative programming languages, like Sonic Pi Processing and Scratch when I remembered a little game I created way back... Read more
Diffing Folder Content using ItemGroups
More on complicated build systems. This time, I was attempting to make the complicated build faster by removing work that only needs to be done... Read more
Applying AML to Improve Customer Experience
Tonight, I’m doing a presentation at our local NE Bytes developer meetup on using Machine Learning in Azure to improve customer experience. The talk abstract... Read more
Soundex Encoding Text in C Sharp
Soundex is a text encoding algorithm designed to create hashes of words according to their sound so that similar sounding words can be matched even... Read more
Slow Down, Lambs
A sign on a back road in Far Sawrey in Cumbria but also serves as a periodic reminder to stop and reflect more. Read more
DateTime in ISO 8601 Format
ISO 8601 date and time format is something I find the best format in logs and file names but can never keep the magic format... Read more
Sample Powershell Cmdlet in C#
Another one from the department of aide memoire. Here’s the basic process to follow when creating a simple PowerShell Cmdlet in C#. Read more
Jekyll Post Generator in Ruby
A while ago, I blogged a quick console application to create a blog post outline, given a set of command line options. That was in... Read more
Travis supports C# CI
It’s great news that my favourite cloud CI service, Travis CI now supports C# directly. Read more
Javascript Message in a Bottle
Another from the department of uses-the-syntax-so-infrequentyly-I-nearly-always-forget. Read more
Extracting Slide Images from a Pdf
Being a programmer, I’m often tempted to crack open a compiler when faced with a task that involves anything to do with computers. Read more
Windows Installers for the Lazy
If you’ve ever installed any software for Windows using an installer wizard, you will no doubt have experienced the mild annoyance of filling in ticked... Read more
Generating File Content in the Build
Whether your build system was developed by Heath Robinson or you simply may want it to look like it was, you can generate files on... Read more
Building NDifference in the Cloud
Ever since I switched over to github to host my NDifference project I have been missing CI builds and looking for something better than running... Read more
Methinks it is like a Weasel
I’m posting this older code example of a simple evolutionary algorithm to get it off my hard drive :) Read more
Computing Text Similarity
A part of the implementation of the NDifference project is finding similarities between pieces of code, specifically finding the closest match between several candidates for... Read more
Html Link Validation
Writing documentation in html for processing into help files with tools like Sandcastle and Sandcastle Help File Builder means that it’s easy to get links... Read more
OrderByDescending
Lately I’ve been working on some code that will delete a hierarchical list of files from Azure blob storage. Read more
Self Hosted WebServer using OWIN
I’ve been playing about with OWIN and Katana recently and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to get up and running serving static... Read more
Creating a Transparent PNG from a Scanned Image
One of the many parts of my sketchnoting process that I took from Mike Rohde’s Sketchnote Handbook is scanning the finished sketch in black and... Read more
Unit Testing with HttpClient
I’ve been moving some code away from depending on RestSharp and moving to the new System.Net.Http.HttpClient in .Net 4.5 to improve security (and that’s another... Read more
Names Are Hard
It’s a common complaint in writing software in general and one of the difficulties in starting an open source project is coming up with a... Read more
Bootstrapping Jekyll Tag Generation
I love working with Jekyll and Github to produce this blog as if it were software. One of the things that helps with usability, I... Read more
Cleaning MsBuild ItemGroup Includes
Here’s a neat solution (that I totally stole from Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi ) to a problem that I sometimes run into when writing longer or... Read more
Kill All Your Managers
Not your line manager, obviously. I mean your Manager classes. Read more
Using NDesk.Options for Command Line Parsing
Another snippet to remind future-me (and maybe future-you) how to use a nice command line parsing library I just discovered called NDesk.Options. Read more
Zipping Folder Contents Using MsBuild
Here’s a script to zip the contents of a folder. Again, this is posted more so I don’t forget but hopefully someone else will find... Read more
Using Environment Variables in MsBuild Scripts
It is only recently I realised you can use Windows environment variables in your msbuild scripts. If you want to allow overrides of build settings... Read more
MsBuild Recursive Import Snippet
Here’s a neat snippet to add to an msbuild script to import all scripts in nested sub-folders rather than hard-coding each one. Read more
My First Ruby Unit Test
I have an on-going project to trick myself into learning Ruby by accident. Read more
Programming by Contract in MsBuild
One of the great ways to prevent bugs creeping into your code during development is to use contracts and assertions for what you know is... Read more
MsBuild Target Order
MsBuild version 4.0 introduced two new Target attributes: BeforeTargets and AfterTargets. Prior to v4.0 if you wanted to run some tasks before or after a... Read more
Transparently Extending the MsBuild Process
It’s often the case that you need to extend your normal build process. To copy files into place before a build. To make files writable... Read more
Creating Jekyll Posts
Being a good programmer, I am told, is all about being lazy. So, I got bored with creating posts by hand and wrote a little... Read more
Murdering Folders. In Ruby
My mp3 player tends to accumulate sub-folders in my podcast folder as my podcast app syncs with it and podcast episodes come and go. Rather... Read more
Decompiling .Net Assemblies
Another entry from the “Combatting Not-Invented-Here Syndrome” department. Read more
Recursive Copy in MsBuild
Simply because I always forget the syntax for this, here’s how to recursively copy a set of files from one folder to another using the... Read more
Timestamps in MsBuild
I often need to include a timestamp in a build, either in naming a file or folder produced during the build, or using it in... Read more
ITaskItem Extension Methods
Writing custom tasks for MsBuild often involves handling files and folders. These are commonly coded as ITaskItem properties in your task so they are accessible... Read more
Simple Batch Html Validation
After struggling with writing a suitable html parser, I began to feel uncomfortable that I was solving a problem that had already been solved by... Read more
Custom MsBuild Task Template
Creating customs tasks for MsBuild is relatively easy provided you follow a few steps. Read more
XUnit Traits and Categories
One of the things I love about xUnit.net is how small the feature set is while allowing you to extend it with the minimum of... Read more
Using NAudio to generate midi
Here’s a small sample using NAudio’s midi file processing classes to write a simple set of notes to a .mid file. Read more