The future of MY dotnet development

It’s been a few months since my last post, mainly due to the tedious process of moving house in the UK, but also due to work committments etc.

That doesn’t mean that I’ve lost touch though - I’m keeping up to date with the development of MAUI (and whether it is actually ready for production use) and the constant evolution of dotnet (or is it .NET? - who knows these days).

During the previous decade I’ve been working as a contractor and an employee, in numerous sectors on a wide variety of projects built using various incarnations of the .NET Framework.

As the end of 2022 approaches I’m now looking forward, maybe not a full decade ahead but change is coming and I need to be ready for it.

Visual Studio for Mac simctl error

My investigations into Blazor have caused me to install a few preview apps, Visual Studio for Mac 2022 being one of them, and as with many preview apps it has problems.

Most recently I needed to make some changes to the Smite Scoreboard app so duly flashed up the Mac and, even though I had installed it for Blazor investigations, Visual Studio for Mac 2022 Preview. After a few minutes reviewing the code a dialog was displayed advising that an update was available so I clicked to install it …. and that’s when the fun started.

Flicking the switch on Github Pages

Well, after a couple of months of investigations, configuration and migration the move from Wordpress to Github pages is all but done - just a few DNS configurations and you’ll be reading this post.

My previous half a dozen posts describe the journey from Wordpress to Github Pages, my motivation for the move, the mechanics and the hurdles I faced.

In general the process of hand migrating each and every post, reviewing the progress in technology since 2009, fixing typos & broken links was quite enlightening. Things have moved on a lot in that time and I have tried to keep up as best I can - knowing that I will never know it all.

With this mini-project all but complete I can now start to think about what’s next on my TODO list - and it looks like it’s moving my other, personal, blog from Wordpress before it’s subscription expires. It’s much smaller than this blog and knowing what I know now it would be quite simple to migrate it to Github Pages - but I’m not going to..!

Comment Import

Following on from my previous update regarding the migration to Github Pages I decided to look at the importing of previous comments and have completed that process.

I had previously thought about just discarding the comments but after reading through them it was clear that there was an amount of good content in there and seeing as people had taken the time to leave them I thought it was a bit harsh to just thrown them away.

That being said, I have made the decision not to look at implementing a comment system into the new blog - if someone wants to contact me there’s always Twitter and Mastodon.

Being a relative newbie to the whole Jekyll platform and the Liquid language I needed to do some research but quickly fell onto a post by Phil Haack where he discusses this very topic.

Static Website Update

Well today is a milestone in the migration of this blog from Wordpress to Github Pages - I’ve (hopefully) transferred all posts as well as created the additional pages such as About and those for the mobile apps.

The process has been pretty eye opening, reading the 160+ posts dating back to 2009, copy/pasting the content from my browser into Visual Studio code, saving the images and downloads and reformatting everything into markdown.

I’ve split the process across my Windows 10, Mac and Linux devices with very little friction. Creating snippets in Visual Studio code to allow me to quick add markup elements for images, downloads and the Jekyll front matter section at the head of every post has sped up the process no end.