Latest posts

27th February 2022

Injecting settings into an ASP.NET Core application

I had previously struggled to work out how to deal with injected dependencies that required some data. For example, if you are injecting a mail service, it is going to need the server settings. That's fine when the service is a class in your own project, but when you want to wrap it up into a reusable Nuget package, it doesn't work quite so easily.

I finally discovered how easy it is to inject the service with the required settings, so blogged about it before I forgot!

31st January 2022

Why do buses come in threes?

The answer to the age-old question of why do buses come in threes is that they don't. Well, not often.

I decided to write a simple simulation to see how buses might behave, and whether or not they really do arrive in threes.

27th December 2021

Accessing Google Drive from an ASP.NET application

Accessing Google Drive from an ASP.NET application looked easy until I tried it, and discovered that pretty much all the information out there is either misleading or plain wrong.

This blog post explains the three approaches I tried, and why the first two didn't work. There are also plenty of links to the only reliable source of information I could find.

22nd December 2021

MVVM-style messaging in Blazor

Sending messages between Blazor components is very simple, and can be very useful. If you're used to messages in MVVM, and want to know how to do this in Blazor, read on...

15th June 2021

On a PC far far away...

I just fired up a virtual PC that I hadn't used for some time, opened File Explorer, and saw this...

25th May 2021

Finding the two closest factors of an integer in Lisp

As a follow-up to a previous post, where I wrote some Linq code to find the two closest factors of a number, I decided to do the same in Racket.

The code was nice, but the execution time was initially very disappointing, until I learnt something interesting about Lisp.

24th May 2021

The tower of Hanoi in Lisp

My experience coding the twoer of Hanoi in Racket, and how the code compared to the equivalent C# code

12th May 2021

Yet another great message from Microsoft

I have previously blogged about some of the great error messages I've seen come out of Microsoft.

Here is another one.

29th April 2021

Comparing Lisp to C# (and F#)

OK, so the title is really misleading, as you can't really compare two such different languages, but it's interesting to try to anyway.

Anyway, being a rank beginner, I had to start with everyone's favourite recursive function, the factorial. This is a good one, as it's so simple, but quickly generates numbers so big that it's pretty useless unless you do something more than the basic coding. The results were surprising.

20th April 2021

I'm learning Lisp, no really!

Rambling introduction to why I started learning Lisp, and my experiences getting going.