Scott Hanselman

This blog post is likely not for you, unless it totally is. Which is why I'm posting it.

My Dad's Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro was driving him batty for months. It was bugging me even more, as I am the assigned IT manager for my family. I'm sure you are also, as you're reading this blog, right?

Anyway, I talk this computer up for months, he gets the computer, and it has this tiny Micro-HDMI connector.

Let me just say that Micro-HDMI is the most evil of all display connectors. I mean, it literally does everything wrong.

Micro-HDMI sucks because:

• Micro-HDMI looks like Micro USB and I can't explain to my Dad that they are different.
• Micro-HDMI is the most fragile of all ports. If you blow on it you'll lose signal.
• It's like the tiny shorty soda pop can of Tab. It's not Diet Coke. It's not enough. It's useless.

Which brings me to the point. His didn't work. Never worked. I tried new drivers, flashing BIOS, new cables, jiggling the connector, everything.

Except the obvious - cutting up the cable.

It turns out that many cables (especially cheap ones from Amazon) don't expose enough metal to make a decent connection.

Take a razor blade and cut a good millimeter around the cable's rubber housing to expose more metal.

Boom. It works immediately. Dad's thrilled. I'm a good son again and Micro-HDMI continues to suck as a display connector.

Full-sized HDMI or Mini-DP (Display Port) from now on, my friends.

Please, regale me in the comments with tales of why YOU too hate Micro-HDMI, Dear Reader.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I was chatting with Phil Haack today about a weird little bug/feature we were seeing in GitHub for Windows. I don't have the source code for the application, but I wanted to explore what was going on and get some insight so I could give Phil a decent bug report.

He and I spent some time on Skype sharing screens today and he commented "we should be recording this." So I went back and did just that.

Please take a moment and Subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: http://youtube.com/shanselman

In this short video I remind folks how Procmon and ProcExp work, how powerful they are and I learn some interesting things about GitHub for Windows!

Let me know if you find short videos like these useful, and if you do, suggest topics in the comments!

Also, a reminder, if you've got non-technical family or friends who want help with Windows 8, give them a YouTube Playlist designed just for them! http://hanselman.com/windows8

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've been working with Visual Studio 2015 lately, even for older projects. You can create and edit all kids of .NET app from .NET 2.0 all the way up through .NET 4.6, as well as ASP.NET 5 apps on the Core CLR.

In my case I've been doing some pair programming with Mark Downie on DasBlog, the blog system that runs this blog right here. DasBlog is very old, and used to be very actively developed. The question "is DasBlog dead" is asked a lot, but the answer is really "DasBlog is done." For years it has been very feature-full and feature-complete. However, this blog has been running on .NET 2.0 for years. Mark and I thought it would be nice to upgrade DasBlog to .NET 4.6, so we did. We've also moved DasBlog over to GitHub. You'll find it at http://github.com/shanselman/dasblog.

Now, to be clear, DasBlog was amazing in 2004 and 2008 but it's aging now. Mark and I think that's the fun of it, though. Mark's added Twitter Card and Facebook Open Graph support, and together we've fixed a few oddities and bugs that have popped up in the leap from 2.0 to 4.6. However DasBlog remains idiomatic .NET 2.0 which means it's C# 2.0, and doesn't even make good use of Linq or generics. We're thinking about a few updates, moving the Templating system to RazorEngine, updating to Linq queries, smarter threading for collections, better caching, as well of Mark's ideas around social.

You might think it's weird to use Visual Studio 2015 to work with a .NET 2.0 app, but it's useful to remember that you get to use new Visual Studio features even with older frameworks. One of the most useful new features is the Diagnostic Tools toolbox. It's a boring name for an amazing new part of VS. I'm not sure what they could call it other than Diagnostic Tools, but it's insanely convenient.

Often we think of Debugging and Profiling as two separate activities, and honestly, I talk to developers all the time that have never Profiled an app. They know that Profiling exists as a tool and a concept, but for whatever reason they forget about it, don't get around to it, or haven't adopted it as a fundamental part of their daily workflow.

The Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 bring in data from a number of sources, Breakpoints, the Debugger, Tracing and Debug out, as well as Intellitrace Events and Historical Debugging (on supported SKUs).

Notice in the screenshot above, I can even see a little tip showing how many milliseconds has elapsed between two breakpoints. It's little features like this that take data that has long been available but not in front of your face. Why dig for it?

I can even go back in time with Historical Debugging. See how I can backup and see the state of Local Variables and the Call Stack when I'm at a Breakpoint?

If you have a SKU with IntelliTrace, you can get extra info if you'd like to enable Historical Debugging.

See how I've got Memory and CPU graphs, and I didn't have to do anything? This pops up automatically when Debugging:

I can take Memory Snapshots, go to the next Breakpoint, take another and compare!

If you've got Visual Studio 2015 and haven't started using these tools, I'd suggest you start exploring. They're useful enough that they've got me using VS2015 RC for all my projects, even older .NET 2.0 ones.

NOTE: Remember that Visual Studio Community is free for Open Source projects, and supports extensions! http://www.visualstudio.com/free

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's a little Visual Studio web development tip that I've been using lately. You know how Visual Studio picks up your installed browsers and has them available as a dropdown list?

I found it very useful when debugging to add Google Chrome's Incognito Mode as a browser of its own.

Pull down the chevron and click Browse With...

Add Chrome from either it's standard or user location:

• System: C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\
• User: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application

Then add --incognito as command line switch and name the browser something like "Google Chrome - Incognito."

You can do the same thing with Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Here I'm adding Internet Explorer with the -private option.

This is a useful thing for developers if you're doing anything with cookies or caching and you've found yourself clearing the cache or browser history a lot.

Question for you dear Reader - Is this a feature you would want by default? Would you want not just every browser added, but also the Private Mode for each as well?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I used to have a saying to put things into perspecive when things were getting really crazy at work and we were freaking out over the Daily Crisis:

Breathe. It's just software, we're not saving babies here.

Now, to be clear, if you ARE saving babies or working on software that does, for crying out loud, don't breathe and make sure you've got unit tests!

But for the majority of us, we're not saving babies. We're not writing Mars Rover code. We're making insurance systems, shopping carts, the next Facebook or Uber, or just doing CRUD. Perspective helps. Sometimes you just need to go for a walk, take a vacation, or well, quit. You've got your health, family, and little else.

His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, "You spend time with your son?"

"Much as I can," he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes.

"It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day'll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you'd give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn't see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won't last, so you revel in it while it's here."

Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he's lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light—the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he's missing—all the lost joy—perched like a boulder on his chest.

- Pines (The Wayward Pines Trilogy, Book 1)

It's cliché, sure, but sometimes clichés need to be said more. Wisdom is the comb you get when you hair is gone, right?

There's a post on Hacker News today called "I quit the tech industry" that you should read. The TL;DR is that working in software for money just wasn't working for this person. It wasn't feeding their spirit, so now they're going to try to make something else work. What a challenging decision it must have been, but at the same time, if something isn't working, why keep doing it? Perhaps it's burnout, but perhaps it's something else. More power to this person for taking care of themselves, and I wish them all the best.

How do you avoid burnout? How do you stay passionate? Sound off in the comments.

* Baby Squirrel by Flickr User Audreyjm529 used under CC

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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