I’ve been writing regular expressions (regex) for years and would consider myself pretty good at them by now (I decline to provide references). The problem is that although it’s common to see regex as cryptic and painfully terse (which are not invalid points), they remain one of the best ways to handle complex pattern matching and as such you’ll probably run into them at least a few times in your career.
Even if you really despise writing regular expressions, here are some tips that will help to make that process as painless as possible!
If you want to just get to the good stuff, scroll down to the “Setup” section.
My wife and I finally got a new printer to replace the old one that has pretty much given up the ghost and refuses to print anymore (often considered an important feature for devices like this).
New printer day! Our current one hasn't been working consistently in about 2 years and percussive maintenance isn't having quite the same effect it once had pic.twitter.com/JD0VuTpFJd
We settled on an Epson ET-2711 in large part because of the ink tank that should (hopefully) do away with the constant stream of expensive cartridges in favour of some cheaper-per-page ink bottles. I was excited to get it out and start setting it up (in part because we’re in another lockdown and what else is there to do right now)!
Imagine my frustration, dear reader, when I found out that the whole wireless setup process for this printer is terrible if you follow the official instructions. I genuinely spent a couple of hours bouncing between the Android app (which gave me a very helpful message telling me “Communication error”, to check the printer is on and not much else), the included software for Windows (which was just as helpful), the printed documentation in the box and the website, all to no avail.
You cannot convince me that this is a helpful error message
The good news is that I finally figured out how to get it working. The even better news for you at home is that I’ve gone through the process three times so that I could document all of the steps to get this working properly!
I’ve been using KeePass for my password management needs since early 2014, but I recently decided that I wanted to move to something a bit more substantial. KeePass is an excellent (open source!) piece of software, but since it stores passwords in a single database file the only way that I could really sync it between multiple computers and my phone was to store that file… in Dropbox.
Yeah, as you can imagine that’s not a great solution.
Anyway, I wanted to move over to 1Password but when I tried searching for “Migrate KeePass to 1Password” I kept seeing references to 3rd party scripts I’d need to use to convert my exported data (no thanks) or that it would require a bunch of manual data entry. After giving it a go though, I can tell you it was actually ridiculously easy and straightforward and didn’t require any external tools or scripts! As such, I decided to put together this step-by-step tutorial for migrating your data from KeePass to 1Password!
UPDATE 2021/11/09: Since the release of .NET 6 yesterday, there is reportedly day 0 support for .NET 6 across App Services and Azure Functions. Unless you have an absolute requirement to use .NET 5, the solution to using the latest and greatest .NET in Azure is .NET 6! I’ve left the rest of the blog post as it was just in case it helps someone, but I predict that it will become something of a relic now that it’s targeting an older version.
I’ve spent the last couple of evenings trying to get a set of Azure Functions migrated from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 so that I can play around with some of the nice new syntax options, nullable contexts and the like. Since .NET 5 has officially been released, it would be justifiable to believe that it would be well supported across the core Microsoft product catalogue, such as in… say… Azure Functions?
I’ve used SSH.NET a lot over the years to send and receive files using SFTP and it’s a very flexible and practical library, but the documentation can be a bit thin on the ground when you’re looking to use some of the more esoteric features it has.
As an example, I recently ran into an issue where I was connecting to a remote server and the host fingerprint I was receiving through SSH.NET didn’t match the one that I expected to see (and could see in WinSCP). After verifying that I was using the same connection settings on both and more than a little spelunking through the SSH.NET source code I found that by default the host key algorithms used by the stable release of SSH.NET that I was on (2016.1.0) are RSA and DSA, while WinSCP uses Ed25519. For my purposes I needed to use Ed25519 in SSH.NET as well even though the SFTP host also supported these other algorithms.
Matthew Champion 