The art of simplicity

I talked about Ollama before as a way to run a Large-Language-Model(LLM) locally. This opens the door to try out multiple modals at a low(er) cost (although also a lower performance) and could be interesting if you are not allowed to share any data with an AI provider. For example you are a developer but your employer doesn’t allow you to use AI tools for that reason. If this is a use case that is relevant for you, than I have some good news for you. With the latest version of JetBrains AI Assistent(available in JetBrains Rider but also other IDE’s) you can now use Let me show you how to use this: Open JetBrains Rider(or any other IDE that integrates the JetBrains AI Assistent) Hit Ctrl-Alt-S or go to the Settings through the Settings icon at the top right   Go to the AI Assistant section under Tools Check the Enable Ollama checkbox. A warning message appears about Data Sharing with Third-Party AI Service Providers. Click OK to con...

When I‘m coding, I'm assisted today by Github Copilot. And although Github does a lot of effort to keep your data private, not every organisation allows to use it. If you are working for such an organisation, does this mean that you cannot use an AI code assistant? Luckily, the answer is no. In this post I’ll show you how to combine Continue , an open-source AI code assistent with Ollama to run a fully local Code Assistant. Keep reading… Note: This post is part of a bigger series. Check out the other posts here: Part 1 – Introduction Part 2 -  Configuration Part 3 – Editing and Actions Part 4  -  Learning from your codebase Part 5 – Read your documentation Part 6 – Troubleshooting What is Continue? Continue is an open-source AI code assistant that can be easily integrated in popular IDEs like like VS Code and JetBrains , providing custom autocomplete and chat experiences. It offers features you expect from most code assistants like autocomplete, code explanation...

If you have never heard about Central Package Management(CPM), first have a look at my blog post a few months ago. Done reading? Ok, we continue... To summarize, with CPM you bring all your dependencies in one place (the Directory.Packages.props file). This makes it easier to manage your dependencies for a large multiproject solution and helps you to avoid version drift where multiple versions of the same package are used inside your solution. Remark: CPM works both in Visual Studio and in JetBrains Rider . Convert your .NET solution to CPM manually If you want to start using CPM for your existing solutions, there are a few steps you need to repeat for every project inside your solution: Go through all of the csproj files and copy the references into the centralised Directory.Packages.props file Remove all the versions from the package reference entries in the csproj files. Although not that hard to do, it would be nice if this can be done automatically. Auto...

Last week during a workshop, I got into trouble when trying to use Rider to build my .NET application. The compiler failed with the following error message: Microsoft.CSharp.Core.targets(84, 5): [MSB6004] The specified Task executable location "C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\2.1.2\Roslyn\RunCsc.cmd" is invalid. Compiling in Visual Studio didn’t give any problems. Another participant in the workshop noticed I was struggling and told me it was a bug in Rider that was fixed in release v2017.3. (Available here: https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/download/ )