Skip to main content

Posts

Disable NuGet Central Package Management for specific projects

Centralized Package Management is a NuGet feature that allows you to manage NuGet package dependencies for multiple projects from a single location. This is particularly useful for large solutions with many projects, as it simplifies the process of keeping package versions consistent across the entire solution. After enabling Central Package Management for an existing solution and committing those changes, one of our build pipelines started to fail. When we took a look at the logs we encountered the following error message: ##[error]The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(NU1008: Projects that use central package version management should not define the version on the PackageReference items but on the PackageVersion items: Dapper;Microsoft.Data.SqlClient;Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration;Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Binder;Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json;Microsoft.Extensions.Http;Spectre.Console;Spectre.Console.Json. What is happening? The reason we...
Read more
Recent posts

GitHub Copilot–Code reviews in VSCode

After writing a post about the GitHub Copilot code review feature in Visual Studio last week, I got a question if the same functionality was available in VSCode. Hence this post to show you how to use this feature in VSCode as well. Before you can use this feature, make sure that Editor preview features are enabled in your GitHub settings: Review changes Reviewing your changes works quite similar to Visual Studio: Go to the Source Control tab in VSCode. Hover over Source Control in the sidebar, and then click on the Copilot code review – Uncommited Changes button: Copilot will now review your changes (this can taken some time so be patient). When it has comments, they are shown inline in the file: When no remarks are found during review, you get a pop up message. You can also see the comments in the Problems tab: Remark: Although this is a nice new feature, I had some mixed results when applying it. Sometimes it gave very good feedback, but o...
Read more

Using legacy text encodings in .NET Core

Upgrading an (old) .NET application to .NET core turned into a learning experience when we got the following error message after the upgrade was done: System.NotSupportedException : No data is available for encoding 1252. For information on defining a custom encoding, see the documentation for the Encoding.RegisterProvider method. TLDR; The application was using an older Windows-1252 text encoding causing the error above when trying to use this in .NET Core which doesn’t support this encoding out-of-the-box. Introduction to Text Encodings Text encoding is a method used to convert text data into a format that can be easily processed by computers. Computers inherently understand numbers, not characters, so text encoding maps characters to numerical values. This process ensures that text data can be stored, transmitted, and interpreted correctly across different systems and platforms. There are various text encodings, each designed to support different sets of characters. Some c...
Read more

GitHub Copilot–Code reviews

The integration of Copilot inside Visual Studio and VS Code keeps expanding. With the 17.13 release of Visual Studio, GitHub Copilot can now review your changes before you commit them. It will examine your changes and provide suggestions inline. Enabling code reviews As this is still a preview feature, you first need to have some feature flags turned on: • Tools > Options > Preview Features > Pull Request Comments   • Tools > Options > GitHub > Copilot > Source Control Integration > Enable Git preview features.    Using code reviews Now when you do some changes, you can ask GitHub Copilot to review them before they are committed. Therefore, go to the Git Changes window and click on the small Review changes with Copilot icon: If the Copilot reviewer has comments, you get a message: You can click on the link to go to the specific comment: Nice!
Read more

GitHub Copilot–Code referencing

One of the risks of using tools like GitHub Copilot, is that we start to over rely on these tools and that we blindly accept any suggestion or code change it wants to make. This is not so different than what we had before with the ‘copy-paste’ programmer who just copied the first snippet he could find online. But with the integration of AI inside our IDE’s, it has become a lot easier to just accept these changes without questioning the quality of the suggestion or its source, especially as these tools can generate bigger and bigger code blocks. This is where Code Referencing can help. It introduces a filter that detects when code suggestions match public code on GitHub, providing you with valuable context to make more informed decisions about the code you are about to incorporate into your projects. Let’s give it a try! Enable Code Referencing Before we can use this feature, we have to check if it is enabled. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your prof...
Read more

Appreciate, don’t evaluate

I like to read a lot . Next to all the fiction novels, I typically go back and forth between technical and more leadership books. The last book at book about leadership I’m going through is ‘Leadership is language’ by L. David Marquet, author of ‘Turn the ship around!’. There are a lot of take aways from this book, but today I want to focus on one aspect that resonated with me: Appreciate, don’t evaluate. As people, including myself,  we kind of struggle with giving other people appreciation for their work. We either forget to do it or when there is acknowledgement, it is typically brief. An example from the book that you maybe recognize yourself: “Great job! Now here’s what I’d change . . .” Not only is the acknowledgement brief, it is immediately followed by criticism. David explains that their are several problems with this kind of ‘celebration’: It does not rest long enough on the accomplishment. It does not invite the person to tell their story,...
Read more

GitHub Copilot– Reusable prompts files

Yesterday I talked about custom instructions as a general way to influence the behavior of Github Copilot in multiple contexts(coding, testing, reviewing, ...) in VS Code. With prompt files you can go one step further, and provide specific instructions for a task. Let’s give this feature a try. Active the prompts file feature First we need to activate this feature: Go to File –> Preferences –> Settings . Search for Chat and look for the Prompt files setting. Click on the Edit in settings.json link. The settings.json file is opened with a new chat.promptFiles setting already added. Change the value to true . Now VSCode will look for prompt files in the .github/prompts folder.   Creating a prompt file Now we are ready to add one or more prompts file to the .github/prompts folder. For every task you should create a separate Markdown prompt file. Remark: It is possible to reference other files inside your Markdown prompt file as well...
Read more