The article Getting the Mouse Position using CSS by Bramus talks about a neat trick that uses sibling elements to react to mouse events without using JavaScript. It also features some kick-ass translucency and animation effects with CSS transitions.

As you move the cursor around, the layer of “cells” change X and Y positions that the CSS text elements “watch”. This lets the central elements “follow” the mouse, transforming a stack of “CSS” texts in a nicely composed and layered stack. It looks like... [More]

This a quick note for anyone else who’s downloaded the latest version of SmartGit (20.2.3 #16150) and is seeing mysterious stashes that they know they haven’t created.

There’s a new feature called “discard to stash” that is enabled by default.

Discard to Stash selected by default

What this does is to stash every time you press ⌘ + Z to discard changes. I understand that this is a failsafe “just in case”, but I kept ended up with a dozen stashes I had no use for. On balance, I’d rather have the tiny risk of wanting changes... [More]

In one recent week, I realized I’d been working in many different areas and on many different projects, so I took an inventory.

For one project, I reconfigured a program with Delphi Pascal, using Delphi 7 (it’s a very old, legacy solution) to run on my local machine instead of in a VM that had swollen to 120GB. For that project, I also used SQL on SQL Server, running in a Docker container that I’d configured with YAML. The solution has several products, among which you can switch, so I wrote a ... [More]

A software product with undocumented or poorly documented commits and a patchy issue-tracker is akin to a shipping pallet with 100 boxes haphazardly stacked on it, all wrapped up in shipping cellophane. You can see some of the labels and some of them you can’t and some of the boxes definitely don’t even have labels at all.

If it looks like the pallet to the right, then you already know you can’t ship it. That’s an obvious train-wreck of a project that’s going to blow up in everyone’s face. But... [More]

Until now, PHP debugging involved a fragile balance between the IDE, the server, and the debugger, each with overly verbose configuration. On top of that, using Docker introduced the wrinkle that you were technically debugging on a remote server rather than on the “real” localhost.

It’s been a long journey, but it’s finally a lot easier to set up PHP debugging with a server running in a Docker container. Once you use the most modern tools, everything works with a couple of lines of... [More]

Groovy is a dynamically typed programming language that executes on the Java Runtime. It mixes its own highly dynamic syntax with islands of Java code. The Android ecosystem and its IDE use Gradle for its build scripts. Gradle uses the Groovy programming language.

The Problem Code

A large project I’m working on contains quite a bit of custom Gradle code for integrating framework libraries, making obfuscated builds, configuring publication, and, finally, creating signed builds.

The signed... [More]

The article Welcome to C# 9.0 by Mads Torgersen (Microsoft Dev Blogs) (May 2020) introduces several nifty new features that I am really looking forward to using.

What about C# 8?

I still haven’t moved Quino to C# 8, as the only feature I’d love to have there is the non-nullable types, which ReSharper Annotations provide with earlier versions of C#. Not only that, but the nullabilities are properly propagated to users of Quino. It’s understood that recent versions of Visual Studio and runtimes and compilers also do this but, until... [More]

The Web Animations Working Draft (W3C) was published in October of 2018. Can I use “Web Animations” (CanIUse) shows that the only browser that supports this API 100% is the latest technology preview on iOS and MacOS. Chromium-based browsers have had (very) basic support for quite some time, but Safari has thrown down the gauntlet with full support, which I learned about from Web Animations in Safari 13.1 by Antoine Quint (WebKit Blog).

This API is intended to replace many usages of CSS Animations and CSS Transitions, which are not only... [More]

Despite the title, from what I can gather from 10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL by Rick Branson (Medium), the author is a big fan of PostgreSql. However, he has such vast experience with it that he can still list 10 things that don’t work as well as they could.

They seem to boil down to:

• Default replication is still serialized and therefore not as reliable as the alternative async protocol that is much harder to configure and pretty much what every other major database offers.
• Obsolete-data-handling requires... [More]

The programmable notebook Introduction to D3 by Arvind Satyanarayan (MIT Visualization Group) is part of a full course at MIT about Interactive Data Visualization.

The linked notebook uses D3.js, but previous classes in the course have dealt with Vega, which is,

“[…] a visualization grammar, a declarative language for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format, and generate web-based views using Canvas or SVG.... [More]”

I found the article A half-hour to learn Rust by Amos to be extremely helpful in learning the syntax and mechanics of Rust.

It starts out with the absolute basics:

“let introduces a variable binding […]”

then takes you through

• Modules
• Blocks
• Conditionals
• Matches
• Options
• mutables
• Copy/clone semantics
• Traits
• Generic parameters
• Constraints
• Macros
• Enums
• Lifetimes and borrowing
• Generic lifetimes
• Statics vs. owned vs. referenced
• Slices and range literals (Index and IndexMut)
• Results
• Errors, panic and unwrap... [More]

Now that Quino 8.x is out the door, we can look forward to Quino 9.

Quino 8 is a very solid and stable release that has already been test-integrated into many of our current products running on Quino. We don’t anticipate any more low-level API changes, though there will be follow-up bug-fix releases.

There are a few larger-scale changes improvements and enhancement, outlined below (and noted in the roadmap).

Ready for Change

With this release, we’ve got more coverage than ever. Excluding... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes.

• Resources

  • Artifacts (Note: the URL is a NuGet Source; you can’t browse here directly)
  • Documentation
  Issues/Changelog

  • Quino-Standard 8.0.0.2505
  • Quino-WebAPI 8.0.0.2511
  • Quino-Windows 8.0.0.69

The links above require a login.

Highlights

• Quino-Web now targets ASP.NET Core (QNOWEB-149, QNOWEB-84, QNOWEB-55)
• Quino-Web has Serilog enabled by default (QNOWEB-147, QNOWEB-146, QNOWEB-145... [More]

I prefer to be very explicit about nullability of references, wherever possible. Happily, most modern languages support this feature non-nullable references natively (e.g. TypeScript, Swift, Rust, Kotlin).

As of version 8, C# also supports non-nullable references, but we haven’t migrated to using that enforcement yet. Instead, we’ve used the JetBrains nullability annotations for years.[1]

Recently, I ended up with code that returned a null even though R# was convinced that the value could never... [More]

After years of getting incrementally better at fixing binding redirects, I’ve finally taken the time to document my methodology for figuring out what to put into app.config or web.config files.

The method described below works: when you get an exception because the runtime gets an unexpected version of an assembly—e.g. “The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference”—this technique lets you formulate a binding-redirect that will fix it. You’ll then move on... [More]

Fossil is a distributed Source Control Manager that claims to offer the same power without the complexity of Git. The article Fossil: Rebase Considered Harmful by D. Richard Hipp (Fossil SCM) is part of the documentation for the tool.

One of the main selling points of Fossil is that it does not support rebase. In the article, the author lays out the many ways in which rebasing causes no end of woes for developers using Git.

I’d heard of Fossil before and I’d even skimmed this document before. This time around, though, I... [More]

The article Z’s Still Not Dead Baby, Z’s Still Not Dead by Andy Clarke (24 Ways) is well-written, very interesting and taught me a few new CSS tricks of which I was unaware.

Granted, my work usually doesn’t call for fancy effects like those you can achieve with something like background-blend-mode, but it can happen. There’s not only background-blend-mode, there’s also mix-blend-mode and filter, all of which apply high-quality effects dynamically.

In the late spring, I had a two-month project where I had to use a... [More]

The discussion React in concurrent mode: 2000 state-connected comps re-rendered at 60FPS (YCombinator) is illuminating mostly in that it shows how ego can impede productivity.

Ego-driven design

Ego can also be that thing that drives a talented programmer to create something of use to the rest of us, but that’s honestly a very rare case. More often than not, the best case is that a developer improves their skills—and perhaps learns to be more humble instead of shooting of their mouth about how “easy” it... [More]

The article In Defense of Utility-First CSS by Sarah Dayan on January 15th, 2018 (Frontstuff) is very long[1], so I’ve summarized a bit with notes and thoughts.[2]

I don’t really care about being pedantic without first knowing some facts. What are the requirements?

Requirements

• Can I quickly make a precise change to a single component?
• Can I make a global, thematic change?
• How quickly can I make changes?
• How maintainable is the result?

If atomic/utility CSS can deliver these things, then it’s probably a fine tool. But—spoiler alert—it... [More]

Azure DevOps allows you to link multiple accounts.

Our concrete use case was:

• User U1 was registered with an Azure DevOps organization O1
• Microsoft did some internal management and gave our partner account a new organization O2, complete with new accounts for all users. Now I have user U2 as well, registered with O2.
• U2 was unable to take tests to qualify for partner benefits, so I had to use U1 but link the accounts so that those test results accrued to O2 as well as O1.
• We want to start... [More]

I’ve written about using SmartGit (SG) before[1][2] and I still strongly recommend that developers who manage projects use a UI for Git.

If you’re just developing a single issue at a time and can branch, commit changes and make pull requests with your IDE tools, then more power to you. For this kind of limited workflow, you can get away with a limited tool-set without too big of a safety or efficiency penalty.

However, if you need an overview or need to more management, then you’re going to... [More]

Visual Studio 2019 (VS) asked me this morning if I was interested in taking a survey to convey my level of satisfaction with the IDE.

VS displays the survey in an embedded window using IE11.[1] I captured the screen of the first thing I saw when I agreed to take the survey.

Visual Studio 2019 Survey error

I know it’s the SurveyMonkey script that’s failing, but it’s still not an auspicious start.

I’ve just read about a web framework called Svelte in the post Virtual DOM is pure overhead. I think the product itself sounds interesting, but that the author uses unnecessarily misleading arguments.

From what I gather, Svelte is a compile-time reconciliation generator for JSX/TSX components. This pre-calculated generator applies changes to the DOM without needing a virtual DOM and without real-time diffing or reconciliation. That is, instead of having real-time calculation, with possible... [More]

Introduction

Testing is any form of validation that verifies code. That includes not only structured validation using checklists, test plans, etc. but also informal testing, as when developers click their way through a UI or emit values in debugging output to a console.

Automated testing covers the topic of all regression-style tests that execute both locally and in CI. This includes unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

Testing is primarily a mindset.

You should think of writing tests... [More]

If you’re familiar with the topic, you might be recoiling in horror. It would be unclear, though, whether you’re recoiling from the “using Collab” part or the “using Collab with Git” part.

Neither is as straightforward as I’d hoped.

tl;dr: If you have to use Collab with Unity, but want to back it up with Git, disable core.autocrlf[1] and add * -text to the .gitattributes.

Collab’s Drawbacks

Collab is the source-control system integrated into the Unity IDE.

It was built for designers to be... [More]

Quino contains a Sandbox in the main solution that lets us test a lot of the Quino subsystems in real-world conditions. The Sandbox has several application targets:

• WPF
• Winform
• Remote Data Server
• WebAPI Server
• Console

The targets that connect directly to a database (e.g. WPF, Winform) were using the PostgreSql driver by default. I wanted to configure all Sandbox applications to be easily configurable to run with SqlServer.

Just add the driver, right?

This is pretty straightforward for a... [More]

In late 2011 and early 2012, Encodo designed a querying language for Quino. Quino has an ORM that, combined with .NET Linq provides a powerful querying interface for developers. QQL is a DSL that brings this power to non-developers.

QQL never made it to implementation—only specification. In the meantime, the world moved on and we have common, generic querying APIs like OData. The time for QQL is past, but the specification is still an interesting artifact, in its own right.

Who knows? Maybe... [More]

Due to the nature of the language, there are some API changes that almost inevitably lead to breaking changes in C#.

Change constructor parameters

While you can easily make another constructor, marking the old one(s) as obsolete, if you use an IOC that allows only a single public constructor, you’re forced to either

• remove the obsolete constructor or
• mark the obsolete constructor as protected.

In either case, the user has a compile error.

Virtual methods/Interfaces

There are several... [More]

Any software product should have a version number. This article will answer the following questions about how Encodo works with them.

• How do we choose a version number?
• What parts does a version number have?
• What do these parts mean?
• How do different stakeholders interpret the number?
• What conventions exist for choosing numbers?
• Who chooses and sets these parts?

Stakeholders

In decreasing order of expected expertise,

• Developers: Writes the software; may *change* version numbers
• Testers:... [More]

Note: this article was originally published at Encodo.com at the end of October, 2018.

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes.

• Download the artifacts
• See the full list of issues

  • Quino-Standard 6.0.0
  • Quino-WebAPI 6.0.0
  • Quino-Windows 6.0.0

The links above require a login.

Overview

At long last, Quino enters the world of .NET Standard and .NET Core. Libraries target .NET Standard 2.0, which means they can all be used with any .NET runtime... [More]