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I had planned to develop the full-text search feature for the new blog engine before starting to deploy anything to production, but I hit a snag. Microsoft Azure only allows you to have one free search service per subscription. Since my dev/test subscription already uses one (for the Weather Now dev environment), I'll have to create a free search instance in my production environment. And because I don't want to deal with cross-subscription security and all that shiznit, that means I'll have to create...

Despite driving 55 km up to the suburbs to have lunch with a friend, I've had a productive day. I'm aiming to release a new round of performance improvements for the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture in about four weeks, when .NET 10 comes out. I have to put that aside right now because a certain fuzzy, vaguely stinky animal is poking me with her nose and appears to have some needs that I don't want her to satisfy in the house. More on this later.

Today is the 20th birthday of the Microsoft .NET Framework. I remember it vividly, because of the job I had then and its weirdly coincidental start and end dates. I joined a startup in Chicago to write software using the yet-unreleased .NET Framework in 2001. My first day of work was September 10th. No one showed up to work the next morning. Flash forward to February 2002, and our planned release date of Monday February 18th, to coincide with the official release of .NET. (We couldn't release software...

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th. Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now. So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services...

Also known as: read all error messages carefully. I've just spent about 90 minutes debugging an Azure DevOps pipeline after upgrading from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 RC2. Everything compiled OK, all tests ran locally, but the Test step of my pipeline failed with this error message: ##[error]Unable to find D:\a\1\s\ProjectName.Tests\bin\Debug\net5.0\ref\ProjectName.Tests.deps.json. Make sure test project has a nuget reference of package "Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk". The test step had this Test Files...

The Cloud—known to us in the industry as "someone else's computers"—takes a lot of power to run. Which is why our local electric utility, ComEd, is beefing up their service to the O'Hare area: Last month, it broke ground to expand its substation in northwest suburban Itasca to increase its output by about 180 megawatts by the end of 2019. Large data centers with multiple users often consume about 24 megawatts. For scale, 1 megawatt is enough to supply as many as 285 homes. ComEd also has acquired land...

The Microsoft Windows operating system has millions of lines of code maintained by thousands of developers. And in the past three months, Microsoft has moved 90% of its code to the open-source Git version control system: The switch to Git has been driven by a couple of things. In 2013, the company embarked on its OneCore project, unifying its different strands of Windows development and making the operating system a more cleanly modularized, layered platform. At the time, Microsoft was using...

Senior Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen describes a feature in Windows 10 that is unusually useful: Windows 10 brings the Xbox Game DVR feature to the PC. The Game DVR feature lets you record yourself playing a video game, so you can share the recording with your friends. Suppose you have some program that you want to record, say for a bug report or for an instructional video. Just pretend it's a game: Put focus on the program you want to record. Press Win+G to open the Game Bar. If it asks whether you...

Despite being a long-term .NET guy, and despite thinking Java has lagged significantly in language features and power over the years, and despite the ludicrous claim that .NET isn't portable, I laughed very hard at this Norwegian video:

No, really. In 1998 Microsoft wanted to demonstrate its SQL Server database engine with a terabyte-sized database, so it built a map called Terraserver. Motherboard's Jason Koebler has the story: Terraserver could have, should have been a product that ensured Microsoft would remain the world’s most important internet company well into the 21st century. It was the first-ever publicly available interactive satellite map of the world. The world’s first-ever terabyte-sized database. In fact, it was the...

The Gateway Arch turned 50 today: And Bill Gates turned 60 today.