Steve Fenton

This is just a quick note about some new features in Microsoft Teams. The wrapper feature is part of Microsoft Viva and is called “Insights”. Once you add it, you’ll have a new tab in Teams that has a few tools to boost your life. There are tools to track your emotional awareness, which keeps […]

There are two basic types of natural laws, or laws of nature. Universal and probabilistic. Universal laws of nature state the when you find one thing, you will always find some other specific thing or things. Probabilistic laws of nature say that things are commonly found together. Some examples may help. If you drop a […]

Unlike my recent article on Global Using Statement and Code Clues, the new namespace declarations have no trade offs and you should just auto-fix them in your whole project and move on with your life. Here’s how we do namespace before namespace declarations: namespace Fenton.Sample.UI { public class Example { } } …and here is […]

If you wanted to include information about your source code in a trace message, there would be quite a lot of prep work to do before you could actually write a message out. Let’s use the below WriteTrace example to show what this does to your application. public void WriteTrace(string message, string memberName = “”, […]

This is a surprisingly common problem in C#, where you need to take a DateTime and strip off the “time” bit to leave you with a representation of a day. Currently, you can do it by creating a new DateTime and passing only the parts you want to keep, like year, month, and day. DateTime […]

This was the first time I needed to create an end-to-end process with GitHub Actions and Octopus Deploy. Here’s how I did it. The set up is a .NET (Core 3.1 currently) website that has an existing Publishing Profile that I have been using to create the artefacts as I’ve been testing different hosting scenarios. […]

The key difference between type coercion and type conversion is that type coercion is always implicit, whereas type conversion can be either implicit or explicit. In other words, “type conversion” refers to the general process of changing a type, whereas type coercion refers more specifically to the implicit conversion of a type. We can further […]

I wrote back in 2018 about how you can use your using statements as a clue to how you might dismember a big class. This makes it easier to see the important parts as you remove things that you “kinda have to have” to make the important stuff work. The trick is pretty simple… You […]

As ancient fables go, The Boy Who Cried Wolf is certainly one of the big ones. For those who haven’t yet heard it, well done! Teachers love to tell this story in an attempt to instruct students on morals, though this is misguided as the story may increase a child’s propensity to lie (NurtureShock: New […]

This is going to be a quick one, as I’m writing this down so future me doesn’t have to set fire to several hours of debugging. I’ll explain more background after I give you the answer. If you find you are getting the wrong answer for element sizes, you are probably using this, where elem […]