This randomly started happening to me shortly after .NET 5 was released, which I realise may well be just a concidence. It was however affecting some of my libraries that target NetStandard2.0 and net471. Strangely the build passed regardless of how I did it — sometimes for example NCrunch shows up issues that aren’t otherwise clear but it was showing nothing, however when I try to pack the library I get —

This is a very common error in the Microsoft world and it has been causing me some grief for a while. The first thing to note is that the error is misleading in that it tells you what it found and this is confusing at best. Microsoft actually have some…

I’ve used Mercurial for seven years now and I am reasonably comfortable with it. Most of the time I’m using it at a fairly simple level and I’ve rarely had a major issue with it though I did once have to help a novice user who had become incredibly tangled…

I use Team Foundation Server at work for version control. It has a few nuances that occasionally catch me out and this is one of them. I’d setup a new .Net project and added it into TFS. All seemed fine until I added a new file. …

I have a legacy system that is being updated to .NET Core 6 with a SQL Server database. One of the fields is an integer datatype but the data it holds is used as a boolean. …

I’ve been trying to write a small application that works with some bitmap images. The way this works was changed by Microsoft not so long ago and this caused me some issues. As I always tend to use an LTS of .NET core I am currently on .NET 6. …

Anyone who uses VS Code is likely to be aware that a new 3 way merge editor was introduced some months ago. This makes it superficially similar to kdiff or the merge editor in VS. The differences however are quite subtle and the new editor does not feel intuitive. For me the reason I chose to use VS Code as my merge editor in preference to Code Compare was the simplicity of the previous editor. Fortunately it’s simple to revert. All you need to do is add the following to your settings.json

This issues happened with a .NET framework application running on Azure Devops, however it could easily recur on any build server. The specific file affected varied but it was generally an arbitrary file from the solution being built. Often it was a JavaScript file or some dll. With this issue…

This came about because I had data in an Azure Storage Table that I wanted to clear out. What I wanted was something like the SQL Server Truncate table command or the SQL Delete command. Googling around revealed various suggestions on StackOverflow however these all seemed a little complex for…