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Steve Fenton is an Octonaut at Octopus Deploy and four-time Microsoft MVP for developer technologies. He’s a Software Punk and writer. You can find out more about Steve Fenton here.
A Note From Steve
The primary audience for the writing found herein is me. It’s super-easy to forget stuff if you don’t write it down, as I did the second time I had to fix a really tricky certificate problem in .NET. If only I had written down the answer, I could have saved hours of irritating replays of all the same steps I had used to find the problem in the first instance. My goal in life is to start a punk revolution in software development. I am also secretly S. M. Fenton the author of The Vanishing Room.
Recent Thoughts
You can review my full archive of thoughts, but the most recent entries are listed below.
How to find installed text to speech voices on Windows Posted in: Programming - I’m using a Visual Studio Code extension that provides text-to-speech, which I use as part of my VS Code writing set up. It has a simple set of two options, speed (1.5x of course) and voice, which is a text field as different options exist on different operating systems. As I’m using Windows 11 on […]
Converting markdown files to PDF in GitHub actions Posted in: Programming - I needed to take a bunch of markdown files and convert them into a PDF, with all images present and correct, and using a CSS-based stylesheet. Behind the scenes, this is usually done using an intermediate HTML step. My attempts to solve this issue took me down a few different paths, so I thought I’d […]
Delete all local git branches except the main branch Posted in: Programming - If you’re a bit like me, you like to keep your desk clear. The same goes for all those pesky git branches you accumulate over time. Whether you are using Visual Studio, VSCode, or some other editor, it would be nice if you could burn it all down except for trunk. The good news is, […]
Web select makes copy and paste easier Posted in: Browsers - This is a pretty neat feature coming to Microsoft Edge. You hit CTRL + SHIFT + W and it brings up a little rectangle that you can position over some content you want to copy. If you’ve ever fought with a browser when trying to select text, but missed something like the first character – […]
GitHub Copilot is coming to Visual Studio Posted in: Visual Studio - Although you have to join a waitlist, there is a technical preview of GitHub Copilot integrated as a Visual Studio extension. Copilot is an AI pair programming tool that suggests code based on a colossal training set of open source code. It can suggest line completions and entire functions as you type, and it seems […]
Writing in Visual Studio Code Posted in: Programming - Despite coding and writing in Visual Studio Code, the set-ups for these two activities are quite different. I’m using this post to track my writing-mode set-up and I expect to revisit it later. Although the work is very different to programming, the writing workflow used by my team is not unlike a typical software team’s […]
Check this before you buy a subscription Posted in: Opinion - Everything is becoming a subscription these days. The combination of convenient smaller regular payments for customers, and a recurring revenue-base for the provider means this model feels like the magic formula all around. Whether it’s kitchen appliances from AO, razors from Harry’s, food from Hello Fresh, or a car from Cazoo – you can enjoy […]
Browser Extension: Link Reporter Posted in: Browsers - I needed to grab a report that listed all hyperlinks on a web page, so I wrote a browser extension to do it for me. Get LinkReporter in the Edge store. Grab LinkReporter in the Chrome Store. How to use Link Reporter Once you’ve installed the extension: Open any web page that you want to […]
Parameter Null Checking in C# Posted in: Programming - Last month, some eagle-eyed folk spotted a change in the C# 11 pipeline. This triggered a fair bit of discussion about the new feature. In this post I’ll dig a bit into the decision and explain a bit more about the feature. What is parameter null checking? Let’s start by looking at the feature. For […]
Change availability of web farm servers with PowerShell Posted in: Programming - I’m running an IIS site with ARR as a load balancer. It’s pretty common to want to take a server out of balance or to put it back in using a script. The below script takes the first server out of balance by setting enabled = $false. The other servers are left in. You could […]