The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘.NET’ Category

Visual Studio Code: blazingly fast text expansion with Emmet

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/09/15

I come from a background of Delphi, Visual Studio and Notepad++ editors that historically have expanded their functionality over decades of releases.

When switching much of my development to Visual Studio Code, which out of the box aims at basic support (which has grown remarkably over the years so it’s way beyond basic now), I decided to review my editing behaviours see if plugins (in vscode speak “extensions marketplace“) would assist me with that.

One of my behaviours I wanted to get rid of is heavily use of keyboard macros, so when doing more web-stuff, I bumped into Emmet (that in the past was called Zen Code).

I bumped into Emmet because I wanted to refactor quite a few bits of html, and embed many sections of text in tags. Normally I would have written a macro for that, but now I did a quick [Wayback/Archive.is] vscode html embed text in element – Google Search and bumped into [Wayback/Archive.is] html – How to do tag wrapping in VS code? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive.is] Alex!)

Since Visual Studio Code has built-in support for Emmet, here are some links so I can quickly find them back:

Hopefully I will now also less rely on user-defined snippets, though they are still available: [Wayback/Archive.is] Snippets in Visual Studio Code

Using Emmet eventually might help me in my blog-writing too, which still is heavily WordPress.com, known for its limited editor, based.

Apparently, my Google Search fu still is good enough to find these kinds of gems (:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CSS, Development, HTML, HTML5, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

In some countries @archiveis redirect their domains using http-302 which can have trouble with multi-WAN

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/08/12

From [Wayback Archive.is blog — Why has the URL “archive-li” changed to…:

Why has the URL “archive-li” changed to “archive-ph”, and will this affect saved bookmarks at any time in the future?

Anonymous

This is temporary and only for some countries. All 7 domains work, so you do not need to change the bookmarks.

In The Netherlands all Archive Today domains redirect to archive.ph using a HTTP 302 redirect.

This caused trouble at my home location, but not at my brother, so I searched for local issues.

In the end, it was because I have dual WAN as network load balancing at home.

TL;DR

Modifying the routing table so traffic for 54.37.18.234 goes to WAN1 was my solution.

Finding the destination address

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Development, Hardware, Network-and-equipment, Power User, PowerShell, routers, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Hardware MAC address formats (which I need for Wake-on-LAN.ps1)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/07/06

Early june, I blogged about Wake-on-LAN from a Windows machine.

My plan was to adopt [Wayback/Archive.is] Wake.ps1 into Wake-on-LAN.ps1 (as naming is important).

One of the goals was to support multiple hardware MAC address formats, especially as Wake.ps1 had the below comment, but did support the AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF, though not the AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF hardware MAC address format:

<#
...
.NOTES
Make sure the MAC addresses supplied don't contain "-" or ".".
#>

A colon separated hardware MAC address would result in this error inside the call to the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs:

Send-Packet : Exception calling "Parse" with "1" argument(s): "An invalid physical address was specified."

So I did some digging, starting inside the above mentioned blog post, and adding more:

  1. Wake.ps1 uses the [Wayback/Archive.is] Parse method in the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.cs source code in C# .NET,  which contains code like this:
                //has dashes? 
                if (address.IndexOf('-') >= 0 ){ 
                    hasDashes = true;
                    buffer = new byte[(address.Length+1)/3]; 
                }
  2. The Perl script at [Wayback/Archive.is] wakeonlan/wakeonlan at master · jpoliv/wakeonlan that started my first blog post in this series which mentions:
    • xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (canonical)
    • xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx (Windows)
    • xxxxxx-xxxxxx (Hewlett-Packard switches)
    • xxxxxxxxxxxx (Intel Landesk)

    I should rename the first one IEEE 802, as per this:

  3. The MAC address: Notational conventions – Wikipedia

    The standard (IEEE 802) format for printing EUI-48 addresses in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) in transmission order (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB). This form is also commonly used for EUI-64 (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB-CD-EF).[2] Other conventions include six groups of two hexadecimal digits separated by colons (:) (e.g. 01:23:45:67:89:AB), and three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots (.) (e.g. 0123.4567.89AB); again in transmission order.[30]

    The latter is used by Cisco (see for instance [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco DCNM Security Configuration Guide, Release 4.0 – Configuring MAC ACLs [Support] – Cisco and [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco IOS LAN Switching Command Reference – mac address-group through revision [Support] – Cisco), so another format to add:

    • xxxx.xxxx.xxxx (Cisco)
  4. [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs remarks:

    The address parameter must contain a string that can only consist of numbers and letters as hexadecimal digits. Some examples of string formats that are acceptable are as follows:

    • 001122334455
    • 00-11-22-33-44-55
    • 0011.2233.4455
    • 00:11:22:33:44:55
    • F0-E1-D2-C3-B4-A5
    • f0-e1-d2-c3-b4-a5

    Use the GetAddressBytes method to retrieve the address from an existing PhysicalAddress instance.

  5. After a bit more digging via [Wayback/Archive.is] “three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots” – Google Search , I found that even more hardware MAC address formats are in use as per [Wayback/Archive.is] What are the various standard and industry practice ways to express a 48-bit MAC address? – Network Engineering Stack Exchange.

    I really do not have all the sources for the various representations for 48-bit MAC addresses, but I have seen them variously used:

    AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF
    AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF
    AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
    AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD
    AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
    AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD
    AAAA-BBBB-CCCC
    AAAA.BBBB.CCCC
    AAAA:BBBB:CCCC
    AAAAAA-BBBBBB
    AAAAAA.BBBBBB
    AAAAAA:BBBBBB

From the last list, which is far more complete than the others, I recognise quite a few from tools I used in the past, but too forgot the actual sources, so I took the full list from there and tried to name them in parenthesis after the links I found above and what I remembered:

  • AABBCCDDEEFF (Bare / Landesk)
  • AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF (IEEE 802 / Windows)
  • AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF (???)
  • AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (Linux / BSD / MacOS)
  • AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD (???)
  • AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD (Cisco?)
  • AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD (???)
  • AAAA-BBBB-CCCC (???)
  • AAAA.BBBB.CCCC (Cisco / Brocade)
  • AAAA:BBBB:CCCC (???)
  • AAAAAA-BBBBBB (Hewlett-Packard networking)
  • AAAAAA.BBBBBB (???)
  • AAAAAA:BBBBBB (???)

Some additional links in addition to the ones above:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Encoding, HEX encoding, Network-and-equipment, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

chocolatey-community/chocolatey-test-environment: A testing setup related to how the Chocolatey Package Verifier runs testing. Used for manual testing or prior to submission

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/29

On my list of things to play around with: [Wayback/Archive.is] chocolatey-community/chocolatey-test-environment: A testing setup related to how the Chocolatey Package Verifier runs testing. Used for manual testing or prior to submission

It sort of is a standalone version of the [Wayback] Chocolatey Software Docs | Package Verifier Moderation Service that you can use to check Chocolatey package that you develop/modify.

From the github repository README:

Requirements

You need a computer with:

  • a 64-bit processor and OS
  • Intel VT-x enabled (usually not an issue if your computer is newer than 2011). This is necessary because we are using 64bit VMs.
  • Hyper-V may need to be disabled for Virtualbox to work properly if your computer is a Windows box. NOTE: This may actually not be required.
  • At least 10GB of free space.

Setup

To get started, ensure you have the following installed:

  • Vagrant 1.8.1+ – linked clones is the huge reason here. You can technically use any version of Vagrant 1.3.5+. But you will get the best performance with 1.8.x+. It appears you can go up to Vagrant 2.1.5, but may have some issues with 2.2.2 and Windows guests (newer versions may be fine).
  • Virtualbox 4.3.28+ – 6.1.6 (this flows in the selection of Vagrant – 5.2.22 seems to have some issues but newer versions may work fine)
  • vagrant sahara plugin (vagrant plugin install sahara)

NOTE: If you decide to run with version 1.8.1 of Vagrant, you are going to need to set the VAGRANT_SERVER_URL environment variable as described in this forum post, otherwise, you will get an HTTP 404 error when attempting to download the base vagrant box used here.

Related: people wanting to do a similar thing for Linux: [Archive.is] chocolatey/choco: Has anyone ever tried to set up virtual box with linux (e.g. ubuntu) for choco testing ? – Gitter

Yes, it should work for choco newchoco pack, and choco push, running on mono.
[Wayback/Archive.is] https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/runs/3660684196?check_suite_focus=true

There is also a dockerfile available here:
[Wayback/Archive.is] https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/tree/develop/docker

However, as @AdmiringWorm said, there are not any official builds or official support at this time.

In my own private fork of choco however I’m using such interfaces as RestartManager

    //https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/restartmanager/nf-restartmanager-rmstartsession
    [DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
    static extern int RmStartSession(out uint pSessionHandle,
                                     int dwSessionFlags,
                                     string strSessionKey);

    //https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/restartmanager/nf-restartmanager-rmendsession
    [DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern int RmEndSession(uint pSessionHandle);

    //https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/restartmanager/nf-restartmanager-rmgetlist
    [DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern int RmGetList(uint dwSessionHandle,
                                out uint pnProcInfoNeeded,
                                ref uint pnProcInfo,
                                [In, Out] ProcessInfo[] rgAffectedApps,
                                ref uint lpdwRebootReasons);

those will be windows specific indeed, but I’ll reach them later on.

Tarmo Pikaro

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

A short review of a few Visual Studio Code preview extensions

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/22

A very short review:

I found the above doing a search after visiting the below to links:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code | Leave a Comment »

To Favor Microsoft VS Code, Microsoft’s GitHub is Killing GitHub’s Atom Editor – time to prepare switching to another open source editor with a rich ecosystem in less than half a year

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/21

If you are still on Atom, try to see if other cross platform open source editors suit your needs.

Myself, I have moved to Visual Studio Code quite some time ago as, though based on Electron – the core of Atom, it is way faster and much better supported than Atom.

The official announcement is at [Wayback/Archive] Sunsetting Atom | The GitHub Blog.

Various sites reported it in different phrasings:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, atom editor, Development, Missed Schedule, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Text Editors, vscode Visual Studio Code, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

How can you export the Visual Studio Code extension list? (via: Stack Overflow)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/16

Adapted from [Archive.is] How can you export the Visual Studio Code extension list? – Stack Overflow, presuming that code is on the PATH:

  1. From the command-line interface on MacOS, Linux, BSD or on Windows with git installed:
    code --list-extensions | xargs -L 1 echo code --install-extension
  2. From the command-line interface on MacOS, Linux, BSD or on Windows without git installed:
    code --list-extensions | % { "code --install-extension $_" }

    or, as I think, more clearly (see also [WayBack] syntax – What does “%” (percent) do in PowerShell? – Stack Overflow):

    code --list-extensions | foreach { "code --install-extension $_" }

    or even more explanatory:

    code --list-extensions | ForEach-Object { "code --install-extension $_" }
  3. From the command-line interface on Windows as a plain cmd.exe command:
    @for /f %l in ('code --list-extensions') do @echo code --install-extension %l
  4. On Windows as a plain cmd.exe batch file (in a .bat/.cmd script):
    @for /f %%l in ('code --list-extensions') do @echo code --install-extension %%l
  5. The above two on Windows can also be done using PowerShell:
    PowerShell -Command "code --list-extensions | % { """""code --install-extension $_""""" }"

    Note that here too, the % can be expanded into foreach or ForEach-Object for clarity.

All of the above prepend “code --install-extension ” (note the trailing space) before each installed Visual Studio Code extension.

They all give you a list like this which you can execute on any machine having Visual Studio Code installed and its code on the PATH, and a working internet connection:

code --install-extension DavidAnson.vscode-markdownlint
code --install-extension ms-vscode.powershell
code --install-extension yzhang.markdown-all-in-onex

(This is about the minimum install for me to edit markdown documents and do useful things with PowerShell).

Of course you can pipe these to a text-file script to execute them later on.

The double-quote escaping is based on [Wayback/Archive.is] How to escape PowerShell double quotes from a .bat file – Stack Overflow:

you need to escape the " on the command line, inside a double quoted string. From my testing, the only thing that seems to work is quadruple double quotes """" inside the quoted parameter:

powershell.exe -command "echo '""""X""""'"

Via: [Archive.is] how to save your visual studio code extension list – Google Search

--jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, .NET, bash, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Console (command prompt window), Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux, xargs | Leave a Comment »

Chocolatey 1.0.0 got released last week (chocolatey/choco · GitHub)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/24

Last week finally there was the stable [Wayback/Archive] Release version 1.0.0 · chocolatey/choco · GitHub.

So I fixed the Wikipedia page

It was a few days after the 11th birthday “Celebration”: [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software Blog | This One Goes To 11! Celebrating 11 Years Of Chocolatey. Not a really festive post, though it does have a really nice overview of 11 years of Chocolatey history and clearly showing the momentum of it has been a few years behind us.

The thing is: hardly anybody noticed the celebration nor the 1.0.0 release. Being at various 0.* versions for like a decade makes people not follow sudden version bumps closely. I only noticed when updating a bunch of testing VMs of which one had a problem, so I inspected the logs and saw the 1.0.0 version.

So these recent tweets did not gain much attention:

Anyway: the release notes indicate a few things scheduled for 2.0.0. Given the sudden 0.12.0 -> 1.0.0 bump, I have no clue far (or near!) in the future that will be.

It is kind of both a saddening and relieved feeling: like for instance Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange (both in the same age cohort as Chocolatey), Chocolatey is just there and mostly works.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell debugging in Visual Studio Code: “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” configuration template is missing

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

Not sure why, but most of my Visual Studio configurations have the “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” debug configuration template. So here is the JSON you need to add in your launch.json configuration file.

        {
            "type": "PowerShell",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt",
            "script": "${file}",
            "args": [
                "${command:SpecifyScriptArgs}"
            ],
            "cwd": "${file}"
        }

The trick is the bold part that prompts Visual Studio for the arguments.

Note: in order to have such a file, you need to have opened a folder in Visual Studio Code first, then open a PowerShell script file from that directory second.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows applications: storing your data in the correct place (Roaming, Local, LocalLow, not Documents)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/02

This is a follow on the below TomTom HOME complaint: Know where your application should store its data.

I know this can be tough, especially for applications that were developed before Windows Vista came around: that’s when CSIDL were introduced. But still: Windows XP already had %APPDATA% (the environment variable equivalent to CSIDL_APPDATA, it pointed to %USERPROFILE%\\Application Data)

Applications should store data under either of below locations. Values are KNOWNFOLDERID constants with CSIDL constants in parenthesis where available. Some have .NET equivalents in the System.Environment.SpecialFolder enumeration:

  • FOLDERID_LocalAppData (CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA)

    The file system directory that serves as a data repository for local (nonroaming) applications.

  • FOLDERID_LocalAppDataLow (n/a)

    The file system directory that serves as a data repository for local (nonroaming) applications that run under “low integrity” (like in a web browser).

  • FOLDERID_RoamingAppData (CSIDL_APPDATA)

     The file system directory that serves as a common repository for application-specific data.

Do not use FOLDERID_Documents (CSIDL_MYDOCUMENTS) as this is specific to user documents, not application data.

The virtual folder that represents the My Documents desktop item. This value is equivalent to CSIDL_PERSONAL.

Basically use FOLDERID_LocalAppData for data that is machine specific and FOLDERID_RoamingAppData for data that should travel to other machines when the user logs on to them.

Be very careful how much you store as potentially roamed data as these can go over slow networks (both low bandwidth and low latency).

Documentation

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »