I was fortunate to be a guest on Steve Carroll's talk show "Careers Behind the Code," but Amanda Silver calls it "Between Two Nerds," so I'm going with that superior title. We also snuck a fern into the shot so that's cool.
In the interview I talk about Empathy and why I think it's an essential skill for developers, designers, and program managers to develop - deeply.
Steve also asked me about how I got my start in tech, and I tell the story about the day I showed up at home and the family van was gone.
I wasn't sure how this interview would turn out, and I don't usually like talking about myself (I'm much more comfortable talking to YOU on my podcast) but folks seem to think the show turned out well.
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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.
I've been talking about it for months, but in case you haven't heard, there's a new Windows Terminal in town. You can download it and start using it now from the Windows Store. It's free and open source.
At the time of this writing, Windows Terminal is around version 0.5. It's not officially released as a 1.0 so things are changing all the time.
Here's your todo - Have you installed the Windows Terminal before? Have you customize your profile.json file? If so, I want you to DELETE your profiles.json!
Your profiles.json is somewhere like C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState but you can get to it from the drop down in the Windows Terminal like this:
When you hit Settings, Windows Terminal will launch whatever app is registered to handle JSON files. In my case, I'm using Visual Studio Code.
I have done a lot of customization on my profiles.json, so before I delete or "zero out" my profiles.json I will save a copy somewhere. You should to!
You can just "ctrl-a" and delete all of your profiles.json when it's open and Windows Terminal 0.5 or greater will recreate it from scratch by detecting the shells you have. Remember, a Console or Terminal isn't a Shell!
Note the new profiles.json also includes another tip! You can hold ALT- and click settings to see the default settings! This new profiles.json is simpler to read and understand because there's an inherited default.
// To view the default settings, hold "alt" while clicking on the "Settings" button. // For documentation on these settings, see: https://aka.ms/terminal-documentation
I've added "requestedTheme" and changed it to dark, to get a black titleBar with tabs.
I also wanted to test the new (not even close to done) splitscreen features, that give you a simplistic tmux style of window panes, without any other software.
// Add any keybinding overrides to this array. // To unbind a default keybinding, set the command to "unbound" "keybindings": [ { "command": "closeWindow", "keys": ["alt+f4"] }, { "command": "splitHorizontal", "keys": ["ctrl+-"]}, { "command": "splitVertical", "keys": ["ctrl+\\"]} ]
Then I added an Ubuntu specific color scheme, named UbuntuLegit.
Note I'm using forward slashes an double escaping them, as well as backslash escaping quotes.
Save your profiles.json away somewhere, make sure your Terminal is updated, then delete it or empty it and you'll likely get some new "free" shells that the Terminal will detect, then you can copy in just the few customizations you want.
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.
I posted recently about What's the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell? The world of Windows is interesting - and a little weird and unfamiliar to non-Windows people. You might use Ubuntu or Mac and you've picked your shell like zsh or bash or pwsh, but then you come to Windows and we're hopping between shells (and now operating systems with WSL!) on a tab by tab basis.
If you're using a Windows shell like PowerShell because you like it's .NET Core based engine and powerful scripting language, you might still miss common *nix shell commands like ls, grep, sed and more.
No matter what shell you're using in Windows (powershell, yori, cmd, whatever) you can always call into your default Ubuntu instance with "wsl command" so "wsl ls" or "wsl grep" but it'd be nice to make those more naturally and comfortably integrated.
Now there's a new series of "function wrappers" that make Linux commands available directly in PowerShell so you can easily transition between multiple environments.
This might seem weird but it allows us to create amazing piped commands that move in and out of Windows and Linux, PowerShell and bash. It's actually pretty amazing and very natural if you, like me, are non-denominational in your choice of operating system and preferred shell.
These function wrappers are very neatly designed and even expose TAB completion across operating systems! That means I can type Linux commands in PowerShell and TAB completion comes along!
Install the WslInterop module with Install-Module WslInterop
Import commands with Import-WslCommand either from your profile for persistent access or on demand when you need a command (e.g. Import-WslCommand "awk", "emacs", "grep", "head", "less", "ls", "man", "sed", "seq", "ssh", "tail", "vim")
You'll do your Install-Module just one, and then run notepad $profile and add just a that single last line. Make sure you change it to expose the WSL/Linux commands that you want. Once you're done, you can just open PowerShell Core and mix and match your commands!
From the blog, "With these function wrappers in place, we can now call our favorite Linux commands in a more natural way without having to prefix them with wsl or worry about how Windows paths are translated to WSL paths:"
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.
I have very low bandwidth. Can I get smaller versions I can download over 3G/4G?
Here's some answers for you!
My work or country blocks YouTube! What about me?
First, we have updated http://dot.net/videos to include links to BOTH YouTube *and* to the same videos hosted on Microsoft's Channel 9, which shouldn't be blocked by you country or company!
How can I download these and watch them offline?
Good question! Here's how to download a whole series with PowerShell! Let's say I want to download "C# 101."
Second, click "Watch on Channel 9" there at the bottom of the series you want, in my case, C# 101.
Note that there's a link there in the corner that says "RSS" - that's Really Simple Syndication!
Right click on the one you want, for example MP4 Low for people on low bandwidth connections! (Question #3 gets answered too, two for one!), and say "Copy Link Address." Now that link is in your clipboard!
Finally, open up the PS1 file in a text editor and check lines 2 and 3. Put in a path that's correct for YOUR computer, again, like C:\temp, or your downloads folder.
#CHECK THE PATH ON LINE 2 and the FEED on LINE 3 cd "C:\users\scott\Downloads" $a = ([xml](new-object net.webclient).downloadstring("https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/CSharp-101/feed/mp4")) $a.rss.channel.item | foreach{ $url = New-Object System.Uri($_.enclosure.url) $file = $url.Segments[-1] $file if (!(test-path $file)) { (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile($url, $file) } }
Make sure the RSS link that you copied earlier above is correct on line 3. We need a Local Folder and we need our Remote RSS Link.
NOTE: If you're an expert you might think this PowerShell script isn't fancy enough or doesn't do x or y, but it'll do pretty nicely for this project. You're welcome to fork it or improve it here.
And finally, open up PowerShell on your machine from the Start Menu and run your downloadvideos.ps1 script like in this screenshot.
What about getting Low Bandwidth videos I can download on a slow connection!
The low bandwidth videos are super small, some smaller than a JPEG! The largest is just 20 megs, so the full C# course is under 200 megs total.
You can download ALL the videos for EACH playlist by visiting http://dot.net/videos, getting the RSS URL for the video playlist you want, and running the PS1 script again with the changed URL on line 3.
Hope this helps!
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.
If you've been thinking about learning C#, now is the time to jump in! I've been working on this project for months and I'm happy to announce http://dot.net/videos
There's nearly a hundred short videos (with more to come!) that will teach you topics like C# 101, .NET, making desktop apps, making ASP.NET web apps, learning containers and Dockers, or even starting with Machine Learning. There's a ton of great, slow-paced beginner videos. Most are less than 10 minutes long and all are organized into Playlists on YouTube!
If you are getting started, I'd recommend starting with these three series in this order - C#, .NET, then ASP.NET. After that, pick the topics that make you the happiest.
If you don't have access to YouTube where you are, all these videos are also on Channel 9 *and* can be downloaded locally via RSS feed! https://channel9.msdn.com/Browse/Series
If you like these, let me know what other topics you'd like us to cover! We are just getting started and already have intermediate and advanced C# classes in the works!
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.
I posted recently about 
