C

2023 C# Advent - What's New in Entity Framework Core 8

This video is my contribution to the 2023 C# Advent event. It’s a highlight of some of the cool new features available in Entity Framework Core 8. Be sure to check out all the other contributions!

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 | 1 minute Read

My Favorite Podcasts & Video Channels for 2023

Every so often I update my list of favorite podcasts and video channels. These are the places I go to for learning and entertainment. It’s especially great to listen to while I’m driving since anymore radio is a desolate wasteland of 40 minutes of ads and 20 minutes of content most hours. But I also like to listen while I code, or work in the garage, or whatever it is that I’m doing at the moment.

Friday, May 5, 2023 | 5 minutes Read

Using C# and Power Automate To Sync An Outlook Calendar

There are some good tools out there for syncing your Outlook calendar to other calendars, especially for O365 or Outlook.com calendars. And they’re well worth the money for the good ones. But sometimes, in certain circumstances (such as if you have an on-prem exchange server that you can’t access from the cloud), you just need a quick and dirty tool to copy calendar events from a local Outlook instance to another calendar. That’s something you can do pretty quickly with a little C# and some Power Automate.

Friday, April 14, 2023 | 12 minutes Read

Turning Any JSON API Into An App

The Internet is fantastic. There are a seemingly infinite array of APIs available for people to use. Many of them are completely free and open to use in pretty much any way you want to. For example, NASA has a wide variety of things available through its public API. I use one of them in Power Automate with a custom connector to post their daily image to Twitter. For my contribution to this year’s C# Advent, I will demonstrate how easily you can implement any JSON-based API into a C# based application.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2022

I’m participating in the Advent of Code again this year. We’ll see if I get further than I did last year, which was about halfway before I quit. You can follow my progress in my GitHub repo over here. As usual, my solutions are written in C#.

Wednesday, December 7, 2022 | 1 minute Read

C# Advent 2021 - Using C# Code in Power Automate

This post is my contribution to the C# Advent 2021. Power Automate has a fantastic feature in preview that lets you add some C# code to your flows. It requires using a custom connector, so it’s limited to those with a license that allows that. There are also a number of other limitations which I’ll get into later. But it’s a start. Yeah, I know, if you want to use C#, why not use a Logic App or Azure Function? And that’s perfectly all right (and for production apps I’d go that route right now). But this is cool, so why not? I’ve blogged before about creating custom connectors in Power Automate. I glossed over the Code tab in that post, but now it’s time to return to it.

Monday, December 13, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code - Day 12

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 12 - Passage Pathing. Problem 1 The Puzzles for Day 12 are a pathing problem. We are finding our way through a cave system. The system has a start point, and end point and a series of caves that are either large caves (represented by capital letters) or small caves (represented by lower case letters). The cave system input is in a the format of:

Sunday, December 12, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code - Day 11

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 11 - Dumbo Octopus. Problem 1 For Puzzles for Day 11, we want to navigate through a cave of octopi by predicting when their bioluminescent energy will flash so we don’t disturb them. The octopi are arranged in a 10x10 grid, with each octopus represented by a power level from 0 to 9.

Saturday, December 11, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 10

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 10 - Syntax Scoring. Problem 1 For Puzzles for Day 10, we’re trying to resolve damage to the navigation subsystem of our submarine. Each navigation line contains a series of “chunks”, which are pairs of delimiter characters (), {}, [] and . They may or may not be nested and appear in formats such as:

Friday, December 10, 2021 | 4 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 9

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 9 - Smoke Basin. Problem 1 In the Puzzles for Day 9, we’re evaluating the low points of a 100x100 grid where each point represents a height with a value of 0 (lowest) to 9. The risk level of a point is 1 + it’s height. We need to find the sum of the risk levels of all the lowest points on the grid.

Thursday, December 9, 2021 | 5 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 8

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 8 - Seven Segment Search. Problem 1 In the Puzzles for Day 8, the wires on our 7-segment displays are malfunctioning and we need to figure out what it’s really saying. For part 1, we’ll figure out how many times digits 1, 4, 7 and 8 are appearing in the output. Our displays are represented by:

Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 7

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 7 - Whale Attack. Problem 1 In the Puzzles for Day 7, we’re getting attacked by a whale who intends to swallow the submarine. To the rescue come a bunch of crabs in mini-subs. But they’re not in alignment to blast open a rescue tunnel. We have to get them to move into horizontal alignment using the least amount of total fuel possible. They all start in different positions, so the first puzzle focuses on the least amount of fuel required get them into a single horizontal alignment.

Tuesday, December 7, 2021 | 3 minutes Read