The art of simplicity

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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...

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!

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...

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,...

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...

GitHub Copilot - Custom Instructions

I talked about custom instructions before as a way to tweak the Copilot prompt when interacting with GitHub Copilot. At that time it was rather limited and you had not much control on how it was applied. The way it was handled was through a custom Markdown copilot-instructions.md file. This feature has further evolved and now you can specify instructions for multiple purposes: Code-generation instructions - provide context specific for generating code. You can specify those instructions directly in the settings, or in a Markdown file in your workspace. Test-generation instructions - provide context specific for generating tests. You can specify those instructions directly in the settings, or in a Markdown file your workspace. Code review instructions - provide context specific for reviewing the current editor selection. You can specify those instructions directly in the settings, or in a Markdown file in your workspace. Commit m...