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I use my webcam constantly for streaming and I'm pretty familiar with all the internals and how the camera model on Windows works. I also use OBS extensively, so I regularly use the OBS virtual camera and flow everything through Open Broadcasting Studio. For my podcast, I use Zencastr which is a we...

See the canonical version of this blog post at the Microsoft Open Source Blog! Ten years ago, Microsoft released the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum, and then later republished them for reference purposes. This code holds an important place in history and is a fascinat...

I've been doing not just Unit Testing for my sites but full on Integration Testing and Browser Automation Testing as early as 2007 with Selenium. Lately, however, I've been using the faster and generally more compatible Playwright. It has one API and can test on Windows, Linux, Mac, locally, in a co...

There are many let's encrypt automatic tools for azure but I also wanted to see if I could use certbot in wsl to generate a wildcard certificate for the azure Friday website and then upload the resulting certificates to azure app service. Azure app service ultimately needs a specific format called ...

GitHub Next has this cool project that is basically Copilot for the CLI (command line interface). You can sign up for their waitlist at the Copilot for CLI site. Copilot for CLI provides three shell commands: ??, git? and gh? This is cool and all, but I use PowerShell. Turns out these ?? commands a...

Mastodon is a free, open-source social networking service that is decentralized and distributed. It was created in 2016 as an alternative to centralized social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. One of the key features of Mastodon is the use of the WebFinger protocol, which allows users t...

I have been blogging here for the last 20 years. Every Tuesday and Thursday, quite consistently, for two decades. But last year, without planning it, I got tired and stopped. Not sure why. It didn't correspond with any life events. Nothing interesting or notable happened. I just stopped. I did find ...

I am not a Home Assistant expert, but it's clearly a massive and powerful ecosystem. I've interviewed the creator of Home Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to check out that chat. Home Assistant can quickly become a hobby that overwhelms you. Every object (entity) in your house that is eve...

I was reading Gabby's blog post about the new TypeScript/JavaScript project experience in Visual Studio 2022. You should read the docs on JavaScript and TypeScript in Visual Studio 2022. If you're used to ASP.NET apps when you think about apps that are JavaScript heavy, "front end apps" or TypeScrip...

I've talked about how I love a nice pretty prompt in my Windows Terminal and made videos showing in detail how to do it. I've also worked with my buddy TooTallNate to put my real-time blood sugar into a bash or PowerShell prompt, but this was back in 2017. Now that I'm "Team OhMyPosh" I have been me...

I wrote a Tiny Virtual Operating System for a 300-level OS class in C# for college back in 2001 (?) and later moved it to VB.NET in 2002. This is all pre-.NET Core, and on early .NET 1.1 or 2.0 on Windows. I moved it to GitHub 5 years ago and ported it to .NET Core 2.0 at the time. At this point it ...

At our house, we use home automation for a lot of different things. One of them is the ability to get a quick overview of the state of our appliances such as the washer, dryer and dishwasher. That way we don’t accidentally forget to turn over the laundry or empty the dishwasher. A red tile on our ...

After showing some pictures of our smart home dashboard, questions started coming in about the cables going in behind the books. Where is the modem and what else is going on? Spoiler alert, the books are fake. Here you see a couple of cables going in behind the books on the top shelve. Removing...

I’ve had some questions lately about how we keep track of all the home automation devices spread across the house. So, I thought I’d share how our dashboard is set up. The dashboard is the web-based SharpTools that runs in Fully Kiosk Browser on an Amazon Fire Tablet HD 10 which is magnetically atta...

Hey! It’s been a few years since I last blogged here! Let’s get this blog thing back in action, starting with something non-technical that I’ve had a few requests for – my story of two years of daily exercise. Happy New Year! Today’s a day where half the world contempla...

Motion, contact, and light sensors are the most commonly used sensors for home automations in my house. With these sensors, you can make a wide variety of automations. But there are so many different manufacturers, protocols, and price points that it can be hard to choose which devices to buy and us...

Here are a bunch of home automation ideas for your inspiration. These are examples of automation rules that have worked well for my family. They might work well for yours too. The ideas are technology agnostic and describe the concept rather than the exact implementation. They should work with just...

After having spent a lot of time and effort installing smart devices throughout my entire house and automating them, I’ve learned a lot of do’s and don’ts. It’s been a long process of trial and error to come up with the right automations that work for all scenarios. Along the...

Recently, I’ve updated over 30 of my extensions to support Visual Studio 2019 (16.0). To make sure they work, I got my hands on a very early internal build of VS 2019 to test with (working on the Visual Studio team has its benefits). I’ve learned that the upgrade process is probably the easiest I’v...

I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual Studio, but unless you understand the basics of how the extensibility system wor...

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