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Coding Practice

How to Run Visual Studio Permanently as Administrator

On one device I run constantly into problems with Visual Studio because my user does not have all the rights necessary to perform the tasks I have to do. The simple work around for this problem is to run Visual Studio as an administrator. While I can start Visual Studio explicit as administrator every time I open a project, but that extra step gets annoying quickly.

How to Fix Warnings About FxCop Being Deprecated When There Is No FxCop Installed

Cleaning up warnings in your project sometimes brings you to strange places. One of the more notable one was the depreciation warning for FxCop. We use StyleCopAnalyzers in our projects and there was no reference whatsoever to FxCop. Yet the build agent had a different opinion and showed this warning:

Warning - CA0507 - Post-build Code Analysis (FxCopCmd.exe) has been deprecated in favor of FxCop analyzers, which run during build. Refer to https://aka.ms/fxcopanalyzers to migrate to FxCop analyzers.

Mobti.me as a Remote Timer

Remote workshops come with their own set of challenges. An often overlooked one is how to get everyone back at a certain time. If you focus on the exercise you easily miss the agreed time to come back. That is even before we start with time zones and specialities like half-hour deviations from standard time (as they occur in parts of Australia).

A nice solution to this problem is mobti.me. This free service is a remote timer for mob (or ensemble) programming. Without any modification we can reuse this service for anything that needs a timer.

A Simple Way to Fix ssl_error_rx_record_too_long in IIS Express

After deleting the developer certificate in IIS Express I could recreate a new one as described in this post. This approach worked, even when I needed to run the IisExpressAdminCmd for every port I use. At least, that was how I could fix all problems with SSL and IIS Express on my machine until a few weeks ago. I finally gave up as I got this error:

Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

The Gilded Rose Kata

Code katas are little exercises that help you to improve your programming skills. My favourite one is the Gilded Rose kata. It was originally created by Terry Hughes and is now maintained by Emily Bache (@emilybache).

While most katas start from scratch, the Gilded Rose kata comes with existing code that you need to modify. This code is available for more than 40 programming languages and covers most likely your favourite language.

The Mikado Method: A Great Help to Work With Legacy Code

Earlier this year I read the book The Mikado Method by Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund. Whenever someone describes their process as a

"pragmatic, straightforward, and empirical method to plan and perform non-trivial technical improvements on an existing software system"

I get sceptical. Too many books claim that and deliver nothing. But this process is incredibly helpful, and I wish I found it earlier.

How to Fix "Error NETSDK1005 Assets File project.assets.json Doesn't Have a Target for netstandard2.0"

After updating Visual Studio from 16.7.x to 16.8.2 on our Azure DevOps build server, I got this error message:

##[error]C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\5.0.100\Sdks\Microsoft.NET.Sdk\targets\Microsoft.PackageDependencyResolution.targets(241,5): 
Error NETSDK1005: 
Assets file ‘c:\agent\_work\***\obj\project.assets.json’ 
doesn’t have a target for ‘netstandard2.0’. Ensure that 
restore has run and that you have included ‘netstandard2.0’ 
in the TargetFrameworks for your project.