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Review of the 14‑inch MacBook Pro in Space Gray

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  Here is an HONEST review of the MacBook Pro from a dotNet developer and long time Windows user. When I say honest, I mean it.  I bought this with my own money for my personal laptop. This wasn't for work or sponsored in any way.  I buy new laptops every 3 or 4 years now.  My last one was a Dell XPS 13 inch 2-in-1. The laptop before that my laptop was a Dell 15 inch XPS. Before that I had a Dell 13 inch developer edition. It might seem like I just chose the MacBook because I was tired of Dell. I have use of a IBM Thinkpad from work and have used HP laptops and desktops in the past. This is the second MacBook Pro that I have used.  I've been a developer for over 20 years, so I've used a lot of hardware. Speed This is by far the fastest laptop I have ever used.  The M2 Pro chip builds and runs my dotNet Core and JavaScript applications 10 times as fast as the IBM Thinkpad from work. That laptop is only 2 years old. The speed just makes this experience wonderful. It makes the

Why I won't be registering as a blogger in the state of Florida.

This blog post is about Ron DeSantis. Why am I writing about Ron DeSantis? Did he create a new JavaScript framework? No. Did I move to Florida? Nope. Did Mr. DeSantis contact me about my blog? No.  Does anyone at the Republican party in Florida know that I exist? Absolutely not. I'm writing about Ron DeSantis because he and his party in Florida are working to pass a law requiring me to register my blog with them. I'm disseminating this information to you in possible violation of a law written 1000 miles away. At the discretion of some official in Florida they may decide that I owe them money and fine me for not registering with that official. I also must tell them how much money I make off my blog post. It's just pennies by the way. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1316  This proposed law is as stupid as the book bans. Just like the banned books, nobody is being forced to read this blog. A person has to seek this blog out. You don't have to finish reading a bo

.NET Maui and VS Code

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  I was disappointed in the developer experience for .NET Maui and Visual Studio Code. I assumed that the popular debuggers and extensions would cover getting an app running. I am always up to date on my .NET and Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code so I just figured the tooling would be there. When the marketplace didn't really reveal a solution for me, I went searching. The best search result for me is the one that pointed me in the direction to get my .NET Maui CLI working.  That's right. I went to the CLI to get my IDE running the way I wanted it to. .NET MAUI with .NET CLI (Command Line Interface) Getting the .NET Maui workload and the maui-check command line tool installed really helped. Those installs made sure that the libraries and emulators were setup so I could run them without Visual Studio.  It also reminded me that I'll need some sort of emulator or device to connect VS Code to. dotnet new maui After running the CLI to create my solution and project, I realize

Special Characters are Truly Special

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Do you remember the days before string interpolation in C#? I do. It was medieval. Those were truly the dark days of development. We would all use string formatting and concatenation and carried swords around to defend ourselves against giant beasts. Ok, maybe I'm the only one that was wearing a helmet but I'm kind of a weird guy. I think we can all agree that string concatenation is not all that fun. It might not be as dangerous as dragons, but it can still light your hair on fire when there is a bug in your code just to display some text. Classes in C# like StringBuilder helped make things safer but it wasn't all that readable. String.Format is easy but keeping the parameters in the right order isn't exactly a no brainer either. What if that code was just in a class behind a view? Can't we just put it in the view? In the code behind it was easily testable, but the context was lost, and it wasn't as simple as what we can do today. output = String.Format("

Technical Support Engineer II

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Want to help Sitefinity customers with technical issues?  This position will be mostly remote but should be within a reasonable distance from the Burlington, MA office.  http://app.jobvite.com/m?3gfnlmw4

Cool new stream about F# from LaylaCodesIt

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There was a cool new series about F# on Twitch today.  It was fun to see and I haven't used F# in a long time. I felt like it was my first time while watching the stream. https://www.twitch.tv/laylacodesit  Here is my code inspired by Layla and Alyssa. https://gist.github.com/trendoid/ad4c5f3b58fc09c6a0ee472a0fd869d6 or if you want the whole project... https://github.com/trendoid/FsharpConsoleApp It just reads from a text file and prints the contents out to the console. // For more information see https://aka.ms/fsharp-console-apps printfn "Console App: Started!" open System.IO let baseDirectory = __SOURCE_DIRECTORY__ let filePath = "Text.txt" let fullPath = Path.Combine(baseDirectory, filePath) let readFilesTask (path1) =   task {     let! content = File.ReadAllTextAsync(path1)     return content   } printfn "Content: %s" (readFilesTask(fullPath).Result)

Use Free Certificates. Always Use a Certificate.

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Azure added free DigiCert SSL certs! Check it out on Microsoft Docs . No wildcard certs but they are free and managed, so since subdomains are free, who cares if its not a wildcard.  So you don't need to do the CertBot stuff anymore if you're on Azure. Using a cert bot is good too. If your cloud doesn't have free certs use  Let's Encrypt .   By the way, AWS had free certs already if you use  AWS Certificate Manager . Don't pay for certs, and you should always get a cert. use free certs