Steve Fenton is a programmer, (hands-on) architect, and theory-y/human-centric manager mostly working around the .NET space. He enjoys creating software that makes a difference to people’s lives; such as mail transfer agents with zero-day threat detection or clinical decision support engines. Steve has been active in the whole DevOps life-cycle and enjoys coaching people on agile and lean methods (and the theories behind them). He also enjoys finding fractal principles; such as those found in monitoring and alerting, or in queuing theory.
Books by Steve Fenton
A Note From Steve
This is my personal journal where I store ideas, notes, and information to supplement my biological abilities. My interests are programming, psychology, philosophy and critical thinking, and the Oxford Comma. The journal largely covers the order software progressio and the families modum translitterandi, processus, and populus. I am also secretly S. M. Fenton the author of The Vanishing Room.
Recent Journals
You can review my full archive of journals, but the most recent entries are listed below.
.NET Core Entity Framework Migrations Posted in: Programming - When you don’t want to script out your own database, Entity Framework Core has your back. When you change your database context or the models it uses, you can use a couple of commands to create and update your database to keep it in sync with your model. These examples run in the Package Manager […] Removing Special Characters and Diacritic Marks in C# Posted in: Programming - I did this trick in JavaScript to remove diacritic marks a while back and the need to perform a similar transformation in C# came up this week. The following method simplifies strings such as “façade” into simple string like “façade”. private static string Simplify(string input) { string normalizedString = input.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD); StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(); […] Microsoft Teams – What Microsoft Taught Me This Week Posted in: Office - After my day job this week I’m attending the Virtual MVP Summit that Microsoft are running. The event is normally held in-person, but due to the current events it was switched to 100% online with attendees and presenters all joining sessions from home using Microsoft Teams. When you stick 150 people into an online video […] Easy API Testing with REST Client Extension for Visual Studio Code Posted in: Programming - Visual Studio Code is becoming my go-to tool for automating stuff. It’s lightweight, it’s a joy to use, and it seems to be able to do pretty much everything ever thanks to a vibrant plugin marketplace. If you test APIs, you might be using an API testing tool of some kind, such as Postman. With […] The Universal Truth of Collections Posted in: Process - The BBC has been running a series called Secrets of the Museum, which features a behind the scenes look at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The longer I watched this fascinating show, the more it revealed one of the universal truths of humanity; it’s propensity to collect things and it’s inability to limit […] Import IIS Log Files to SQL Server with Web Log Importer Posted in: Programming - In the past I have used Log Parser Studio to run SQL style queries against IIS logs, but it can take a fair bit of time to do this. Sometimes you just want to run a quick SQL query against the log data that IIS has collected. SQL Server is a super quick way of […] Avoid Expensive innerHTML Manipulation with insertAdjacentHTML Posted in: Programming - It is pretty well known these days that fiddling with innerHTML is terribly inefficient. It triggers serialization, and it can result in invalid markup. Nevertheless, you’ll still find this being done in many applications. elem.innerHTML = elem.innerHTML + '<a href="https://www.example.com">Visit Example Dot Com</a>'; // or elem.innerHTML += '<a href="https://www.example.com">Visit Example Dot Com</a>'; You can avoid […] HTML Challenge: Toggle Switch vs Checkbox Posted in: Programming - The toggle switch has very suddenly become a ubiquitous feature of web user interfaces. You can’t hardly fill in an HTML form these days without finding one; especially as 99% of forms we now fill in are concerned with “cookie consent”. Why isn’t the toggle switch a first-class citizen of HTML, you may ask… to […] Set a Minimum Font Size Posted in: Programming - This is just a little script I needed to use to increase text size conditionally. It only increases text below a minimum size and leaves everything else. (function () { var minFontSize = function () { $(".content-zone *").each(function () { var $this = $(this); if (parseInt($this.css("fontSize"), 10) < 16) { $this.css({ "font-size": "16px" }); } […] Can You Average Averages in Your Analytics? Posted in: Analytics - There is a common question that crops up in analytics, which is can you average your averages. The short answer is no, but a longer explanation is probably needed. Whether you have grouped your data by month, or region, or some other facet – each average you see is based on a different number of […]
