Scott Hanselman

It's a double-meeting that! Get it? "Outlook?"

Seriously, though, sometimes folks comment on my busy schedule and I joke that I'm "playing tetris with Outlook" where appointments are falling blocks and I'm twisting and turning them and trying to make it all fit. I also often take some time and actively defrag my calendar.

Defraggging your system's disk usually happens automatically - in the past it didn't - as background processes attempt to "reduce the fragmentation of (a file) by concatenating parts stored in separate locations on a disk." That's a techie explanation.

Here's a basic one. Ever look at your bookshelf and you've got no system? Books all over, no plan. Even worse, imagine someone ripped a book in half along the spine and stored half the book on the top and the rest on the bottom shelf? Why, you'd be scandalized and you'd want to tidy up.

Sometimes folks organize their books by color, sometimes by topic, usually by author. Point is, it can get messy, and you need to take a moment to get organized. The result is a nice tidy bookshelf that has less psychic weight and where the books you want are where you can get to them quickly.

Defragment your schedule

Why not do the same to our calendars? Often we'll just look for an open lot and a 30 min meeting will just drop in there, like an unwanted Tetris piece. If we had more time and energy we might be more aggressive and put the meeting (especially if it's a recurring meeting) in a specific slot.

What slot though? What are we optimizing for? That's up to you, but I'd consider optimizing for context switching - specifically, avoiding context switches before and after meetings.

For example, if you're a coder and you enjoy getting into the flow, avoid putting a meeting in the middle of that flow.

If you are mentoring people - perhaps like me you have a half dozen - then put them all on the same day so your brain is in "mentoring mode." Batch up your code reviews. Make email management an appointment. Is Tuesday creative day? What about No-Meetings Mondays?

Also, make sure you're color coding - just like the defragger! I use categories in my calendar and give meaning to each color so I can easily and quickly tell at a glance if this is a "Balanced Week" or if it's gonna feel weird. If you use colors that clash next to meetings with topics that clash then you can mentally prep yourself for the Context Switch.

What do YOU want your defragmented calendar to look like? Typically it takes just willpower and awareness to defrag your calendar. And just like disk defragmenting, things might run slower for a bit while you're doing it, but the result will be neater and tidier and allow you to be more effective! It'll also, ahem, improve your Outlook.

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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 blogged about NancyFX 6 years ago and since then lots of ASP.NET open source frameworks that build upon - and improve! - web development on .NET have become popular.

There's more than one way to serve and angle bracket (or curly brace) my friends!

Jonathan Channon and the Carter Community (JC was a core Nancy contributor as well) have been making a thin layer of extension methods and conventions on top of ASP.NET Core to make URL routing "more elegant." Carter adds and formalizes a more opinionated framework and also adds direct support for the amazing FluentValidation.

One of the best things about ASP.NET Core is its extensibility model and Carter takes full advantage of that. Carter is ASP.NET.

You can add Carter to your existing ASP.NET Core app by just "dotnet add package carter" and adding it to your Startup.cs:

public class Startup
{
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        services.AddCarter();
    }

    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
    {
        app.UseRouting();
        app.UseEndpoints(builder => builder.MapCarter());
    }
}

At this point you can make a quick "microservice" - in this case just handle an HTTP GET - in almost no code, and it's super clear to read:

public class HomeModule : CarterModule
{
    public HomeModule()
    {
        Get("/", async (req, res) => await res.WriteAsync("Hello from Carter!"));
    }
}

Or you can add Carter as a template so you can later "dotnet new carter." Start by adding the Carter Template with "dotnet new -i CarterTemplate" and now you can make a new boilerplate starter app anytime.

There's a lot of great sample code on the Carter Community GitHub. Head over to https://github.com/CarterCommunity/Carter/tree/master/samples and give them more Stars!

Carter can also cleanly integrate with your existing ASP.NET apps because, again, it's extensions and improvements on top of ASP.NET. Now how you can add Carter to a ASP.NET Core app that's using Controllers in the MVC pattern just like this:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
    app.UseRouting();
    app.UseEndpoints(builder =>
    {
        builder.MapDefaultControllerRoute();
        builder.MapCarter();
    });
}

Then easily handle a GET by returning a list of things as JSON like this:

this.Get<GetActors>("/actors", async (req, res) =>
{
    var people = actorProvider.Get();
    await res.AsJson(people);
});

Again, check out Carter on GitHub at and follow https://twitter.com/CarterLibs on Twitter!

Sponsor: Like C#? We do too! That’s why we've developed a fast, smart, cross-platform .NET IDE which gives you even more coding power. Clever code analysis, rich code completion, instant search and navigation, an advanced debugger... With JetBrains Rider, everything you need is at your fingertips. Code C# at the speed of thought on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Try JetBrains Rider today!

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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My colleague Tara and I were working on prepping a system for Azure IoT development and were using WSL2 on our respective machines. The scripts we were running were long-running and tedious and by the time they were done we basically had a totally customized perfect distro.

Rather than sharing our scripts and having folks run them for hours, we instead decided to export the distro and import it on n number of machines. That way Tara could set up the distro perfectly and then give it to me.

For example, when using PowerShell I can do this:

C:\Users\Scott\Desktop> wsl --export PerfectWSLDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar

Then I can share the resulting tar and give it to a friend and they can do this! (Note that I'm using ~ which is your home directory from PowerShell. If you're using cmd.exe you'll want to include the full path like c:\users\scott\Appdata\Local\PerfectDistro)

mkdir ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro
wsl --import PerfectDistro ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar --version 2

You can list our your WSL distros like this:

C:\Users\Scott\Desktop> wsl --list -v
  NAME            STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu-18.04    Stopped         2
  WLinux          Stopped         2
  Debian          Stopped         1
  PerfectDistro   Stopped         2

It's surprisingly easy! Also, make sure you have the latest version of the Windows Terminal (and if you've got an old version and haven't deleted your profile.json, it's time to start fresh) it will automatically detect your WSL distros and make menu items for them!

Also be sure to check out my YouTube video on developing with WSL2!

Sponsor: Like C#? We do too! That’s why we've developed a fast, smart, cross-platform .NET IDE which gives you even more coding power. Clever code analysis, rich code completion, instant search and navigation, an advanced debugger... With JetBrains Rider, everything you need is at your fingertips. Code C# at the speed of thought on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Try JetBrains Rider today!

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 got a lot of different sound devices like USB Headphones, a formal Conference Room Speakerphone for conference calls, and 5.1 Surround Sound speakers, as well as different mics like a nice Shure XLR connected to a PV6 USB Audio Mixer, as well as the built in mics in my webcams and other devices.

There's lots of great audio apps and applets that can improve the audio switching situation on Windows. I like Audio Switcher and the similarly named https://audioswit.ch/er, for example.

You can also automatically change your audio inputs automatically depending on the app. So if you always want to record your podcast with Audacity you can tell Windows 10 to always set (lie) the audio ins and outs on an app by app basis. The app will never know the difference.

But I need to change audio a lot when I'm moving from Teams calls, recording Podcasts, and watching shows. I've got this Elgato Stream Deck that has buttons I can assign to anything. Combine the Stream Deck with the lovely NirCmd utility from NirSoft and I've got one click audio changes!

The icons are just PNGs and there's lots available online. I created a bunch of batch files (*.bat) with contents like this:

nircmdc setdefaultsounddevice "Speakers" 0

and

nircmdc setdefaultsounddevice "Headphones" 0  

The last number is 0, 1, or 2 where that means Console, Multimedia, or Communications. You can have one sound device for apps like Netflix and another for apps like Skype that identify as Communications. I just change all defaults, myself.

You can also add in commands like "setsubunitvolumedb" and others to have preset volumes and levels for line-ins. It's ideal for getting reliable results.

Then just use the Stream Deck utility to assign the icon and batch file using the "System | Open" widget. Drag it over and assign and you're set! If you can't figure out what the names of your sound devices are, you can call nircmd showsoundevices.

It just took a few minutes to set this up and it'll save me a bunch of clicks every day.

Sponsor: Like C#? We do too! That’s why we've developed a fast, smart, cross-platform .NET IDE which gives you even more coding power. Clever code analysis, rich code completion, instant search and navigation, an advanced debugger... With JetBrains Rider, everything you need is at your fingertips. Code C# at the speed of thought on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Try JetBrains Rider today!

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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OK, fine maybe they DID teach you this in class. But, you'd be surprised how many people think they know something but don't know the background or the etymology of a term. I find these things fascinating. In a world of bootcamp graduates, community college attendees (myself included!), and self-taught learners, I think it's fun to explore topics like the ones I plan to cover in my new YouTube Series "Computer things they didn't teach you."

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: I think of this series as being in the same vein as the wonderful "Imposter's Handbook" series from Rob Conery (I was also involved, somewhat). In Rob's excellent words: "Learn core CS concepts that are part of every CS degree by reading a book meant for humans. You already know how to code build things, but when it comes to conversations about Big-O notation, database normalization and binary tree traversal you grow silent. That used to happen to me and I decided to change it because I hated being left out. I studied for 3 years and wrote everything down and the result is this book."

In the first video I covered the concept of Carriage Returns and Line Feeds. But do you know WHY it's called a Carriage Return? What's a carriage? Where did it go? Where is it returning from? Who is feeding it lines?

In this second video I talk about Code Pages, Character Encoding, Unicode, UTF-8 and the BOM. I thought it went very well.

What would you like to hear about next?

Sponsor: Like C#? We do too! That’s why we've developed a fast, smart, cross-platform .NET IDE which gives you even more coding power. Clever code analysis, rich code completion, instant search and navigation, an advanced debugger... With JetBrains Rider, everything you need is at your fingertips. Code C# at the speed of thought on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Try JetBrains Rider today!

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.

About   Newsletter

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