Archive

15th December 2020

OnInitializedAsync() - No suitable method to override

I've been working on a new Blazor project for a few weeks, and have been bothered by the number of seemingly odd errors reported in the Visual Studio error panel. The main reason they bothered me (other than the unhelpful fact that they all claim to be on line 1 character 1 of the relevant file, which isn't very helpful) is that the code runs fine. Whilst this has been annoying me, as things were working, I didn't spend too much time on it.

However, I just ran into another problem, and the solution turned out to solve this one as well.

7th December 2020

Missing Blazor templates, and how I found them (eventually) and then didn't need them

My frustration at not being able to find some Blazor project templates in Visual Studio, and how I discovered the dumb stupid reason why.

1st December 2020

Finding the number of rows in every table in an SQL database

The latest in my vague series of posts about using LinqPad to query the schema of a database, and extract information about the database as a whole. In this case, it was finding the number of rows in each table, and whether any were empty.

22nd September 2020

Creating a busy indicator in Blazor

How to create a simple (but effective) busy indicator component in Blazor to show your users that their data is being loaded

23rd August 2020

First 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e

Inspired by a long-defunct billboard advert, I coded up a Linq expression to find the first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e. This turned out to be disappointingly easy

1st August 2020

Finding the prime factors of your telephone number

Ever wondered what the prime factors of your telephone number are? No, nor had I until I read Humble Pi. A throwaway comment there led me to contemplate how to do this in a single Linq statement.

Why? Why not?

1st July 2020

Making C# more functional by adding a With method

The "with" keyword is a crucial part of a functional programmer's toolbox, but is sadly lacking in C#. In this blog post, I document the development of a template that will automatically generate a With() method for C# classes.

28th April 2020

How to find out what window has focus

I recently switched to Windows 10, and have found that one really annoying habit it has is that it will randomly switch focus without warning. I can be typing an email, scrolling down through the errors in the event viewer to see what vital parts of Windows crashed today and so on, and suddenly I find that my words are not entered into the email, the events aren't scrolling, etc.

A quick bit of searching revealed that a lot of people have had the same problem, and very few have managed to solve it. The main problem is finding out what gets the focus.

This post explains how I found out.

21st April 2020

Windows 10, built to last

Whilst I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Windows 10, the number of errors that seem to crop up, and the number of basic features that seem to stop working for no good reason, it has produced more than its fair share of amusements.

Today's suggests that Microsoft have an amazing level of confidence in the staying power of Windows 10.

20th April 2020

Another great error message from Microsoft

12th March 2020

Erm, how urgent is it?

I just lurve clients sometimes!

Our main client has the (probably not uncommon) habit of labelling every ticket as urgent. The problem with this is that when something really urgent comes along, they have no way of making it stand out above the other urgent jobs. This predictably led to the creation of a "Very urgent" rating.

Today they outdid themselves...



This led to a lively debate as to what would come next. How about "-1. Life threatening"?

19th February 2020

Changing the data type and length of columns in existing SQL Server tables

Faced with the task of modifying every varchar(n) column of every table in a database to be varchar(max), whilst avoiding default constraint errors, I came up with a script to generate the SQL for me.

18th February 2020

Discriminated unions in C#

How to generate classes to represent discriminated unions in C#

9th February 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 11, Ruby vs C# speed tests

6th February 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 10, improving the Aldous-Broder algorithm to remove short dead-ends

3rd February 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 9, some statistics, and combining the Aldous-Broder and Wilson's algorithms

Having coded up two more complex algorithms, I analysed them to see how they compared, and then combined the two in an attempt (failed) to produce a hybrid algorithm that was faster than either of its parents.

27th January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 8, a random walk with Wilson's algorithm

23rd January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 7, the Aldous-Broder algorithm, and when random is not very random

20th January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 6, paths through the mazes

16th January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 5, Dijkstra's algorithm

13th January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 4, implementing the first two algorithms

Part 4 in my ongoing series of how I implemented the code from Mazes For Programmers by Jamis Buck in C#.

In this post, I explain how I implemented the first two maze-generation algorithms in C#, and show how parts of the code were improved by using Linq.

12th January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 3, graphical UI

Part 3 in my ongoing series of how I implemented the code from Mazes For Programmers by Jamis Buck in C#.

The author rendered the mazes in graphical form using a Ruby library that allows you to create PNG images. This requires you to run the code, then open the saved image, then remember to close it before running the code again, otherwise you get a "File access denied" error, all of which seemed like hard work. As I work with WPF on a day-to-day basis, I decided to use that to render my mazes, as it was quicker and easier.

This post shows how I did it.

12th January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 2, some basics

Part 2 in my ongoing series of how I implemented the code from Mazes For Programmers by Jamis Buck in C#.

In this post, I show a couple of the places where my basic code deviated from the author's.

1st January 2020

Mazes For Programmers part 1, introduction

Part 1 in my ongoing series of how I implemented the code from Mazes For Programmers by Jamis Buck in C#.

In this post, I waffle on about the book, why I decided to implement the code in C# rather than Ruby, and generally spend a fair bit of time not saying much. Pretty regular blog post for me!