Scott Hanselman

Visual Studio Online was announced in preview, so I wanted to try it out. I already dig the Visual Studio "Remote" technology (it's almost impossibly amazing) so moving the local container or WSL to the Cloud makes a lot of sense. Check out their blog post here.

There's three quick starts.

• VS Online in the browser
• VS Online in VS Code
• VS Online in Visual Studio (in private preview so I don't have that but you can sign up!)

Sweet. I'll start with with Browser version, which is the easiest one I'm guessing. I head to the login page. I'm using the new Edge browser.

I see this page that says I have no "environments" set up.

I'll make a plan. I changed mine to fall asleep (suspend) in 5 minutes, but the default is 30. Pricing is here.

Now it's making my environment.

I clicked on it. Then opened a new Terminal, ran "dotnet new web" and I'm basically in a thin VS Code, except in the browser. I've got intellicode, I can install the C# extension.

Since I'm running a .NET app I had to run these commands in a new terminal to generate and trust certs for SSL.

dotnet dev-certs https
dotnet dev-certs https -- trust

Then I hit the Debug menu to build and compile my app IN THE CLOUD and I get "connecting to the forwarded port" as its "localhost" is in the cloud.

Now I've hit a breakpoint! That's bonkers.

Now to try it in VS Code rather than online in the browser. I installed the Visual Studio Online extention and clicked on the little Remote Environment thing on the left side after running VS Code.

This is amazing. Look on the left side there. You can see my Raspberry PI as an SSH target. You can see my new VS Online Plan, you can see my Docker Containers because I'm running Docker for Windows, you can see my WSL Targets as I've got multiple local Linuxes.

Since I'm running currently in VS Online (see the HanselmanTestPlan1 in the lower corner in green) I can just hit F5 and it compiles and runs.

It's a client-server app. VS Code is doing some of the work, but the heavy lifting is in the cloud. Same as if I split the work between Windows and WSL locally, in this case VS Code is talking to that 8 gig Linux Environment I made earlier.

When I hit localhost:500x it's forwarded up to the cloud:

Amazing. Now I can do dev on a little cheapo laptop but have a major server to the work in the cloud. I can then head over to https://online.visualstudio.com/environments and delete it, or I can let it suspend.

I'm going to continue to explore this and see if I can open my blog and podcast sites in this world. Then I can open and develop on them from anywhere. Or soon from my iPad Pro!

Go give Visual Studio Online a try. It's Preview but it's lovely.

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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'm an unabashed Adafruit fan and I often talking about them because I'm always making cool stuff with their hardware and excellent tutorials. You should check out the YouTube video we made when I visited Adafruit Industries in New York with my nephew. They're just a lovely company.

While you're at it, go sign up for the Adabox Subscription and get amazing hardware projects mailed to you in a mystery box regularly!

One of the devices I keep coming back to is the extremely versatile Circuit Playground Express. It's under $25 and does a LOT.

It's got 10 NeoPixels, a motion sensor, temp sensor, light sensor, sound sensor, buttons, a slide, and a speaker. It even can receive and transmit IR for any remote control. It's great for younger kids because you can use alligator clips for the input output pins which means no soldering for easy projects.

You can also mount the Circuit Playground Express onto a Crickit which is the "Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It's an add-on lets you #MakeRobotFriend using CircuitPython, MakeCode, or Arduino." The Crickit makes it easy to control motors and adds additional power options to drive them! Great for creating small bots or battlebots as my kids do.

The most significant - and technically impressive, in my opinion - aspect of the Circuit Playground Express is that it doesn't dictate the tech you use! There's 3 great ways to start.

• Start your journey with Microsoft MakeCode block-based or Javascript programming.
• Then, you can use the same board to try CircuitPython, with the Python interpreter running right on the Express.
• As you progress, you can advance to using Arduino IDE, which has full support of all the hardware down to the low level, so you can make powerful projects.

Start by exploring MakeCode for Circuit Playground Express by just visiting https://makecode.adafruit.com/ and running in the browser!

Device Simulator Express for Adafruit Circuit Playground Express

Next, check out the Device Simulator Express extension for Visual Studio Code! This was made over the summer by Christella Cidolit, Fatou Mounezo, Jonathan Wang, Lea Akkari, Luke Slevinsky, Michelle Yao, and Rachel Phinnemore, the interns at the Microsoft Garage Vancouver!

This great extension lets YOU, Dear Reader, code for a Circuit Playground Express without the physical hardware! And when you've got one in your hards, it makes development even easier. That means:

• Device simulation for those without hardware
• Code deployment to devices
• Auto-completion and error flagging
• Debugging with the simulator

You'll need these things:

• Visual Studio Code
• Node
• Python 3.7.4: Make sure you've added python and pip to your PATH in your environment variables. (1)
• Python VS Code extension: This will be installed automatically from the marketplace when you install...
• Device Simulator Express

Fire up Visual Studio Code with the Device Simulator Express extension installed and then select "Device Simulator Express: New File" in the command palette (CTRL+SHIFT+P to open the palette).

There's a lot of potential here! You've got the simulated device on the right and the Python code on the left. There's step by step debugging in this virtual device. There's a few cool things I can think of to make this extension easier to set up and get started that would be it a killer experience for an intermediate developer who is graduating from MakeCode into a Code editor like VS Code.

It's early days and the interns are back in school but I'm hoping to see this project move forward and get improved. I'll blog more details as I have them!

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 was talking to Tara and we were marveling that in in 1997 15% of Americans had Passports. However, even now less than half do. Consider where the US is physically located. It's isolated in a hemisphere with just Canada and Mexico as neighbors. In parts of Europe a 30 minute drive will find three or four languages, while I can't get to Chipotle in 30 minutes where I live.

A friend who got a passport and went overseas at age 40 came back and told me "it was mind-blowing. There's billions of people who will never live here...and don't want to...and that's OK. It was so useful for me to see other people's worlds and learn that."

I could tease my friend for their awakening. I could say a lot of things. But for a moment consider the context of someone geographically isolated learning - being reminded - that someone can and will live their whole life and never need or want to see your world.

Travel of any kind opens eyes.

Now apply this to technology. I'm a Microsoft technologist today but I've done Java and Mainframes at Nike, Pascal and Linux at Intel, and C and C++ in embedded systems as a consultant. It's fortunate that my technology upbringing has been wide-reaching and steeped in diverse and hybrid systems, but that doesn't negate someone else's bubble. But if I'm going to speak on tech then I need to have a wide perspective. I need to visit other (tech) cultures and see how they live.

You may work for Microsoft, Google, or Lil' Debbie Snack Cakes but just like you should consider getting a passport, you should absolutely visit other (tech) cultures. Travel will make you more well-rounded. Embrace the ever-changing wonders of the world and of technology. Go to their meet-ups, visit their virtual conferences, follow people outside your space, try to build their open source software, learn a foreign (programming) language. They may not want or need to visit yours, but you'll be a better and more well-rounded person when you return home if you're chose to be technology tourist.

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 blogged at length about the great open source project called "Polly"

• NuGet Package of the Week: Polly wanna fluently express transient exception handling policies in .NET?
• Adding Cross-Cutting Memory Caching to an HttpClientFactory in ASP.NET Core with Polly
• The Programmer's Hindsight - Caching with HttpClientFactory and Polly Part 2
• Adding Resilience and Transient Fault handling to your .NET Core HttpClient with Polly

and I've blogged about "Try .NET" which is a wonderful .NET Core global tool that lets you make interactive in-browser documentation and create workshops that can be run both online and locally (totally offline!)

• Introducing the Try .NET Global Tool - interactive in-browser documentation and workshop creator

If you've got .NET Core installed, you can try it in minutes! Just do this:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-try
dotnet try demo

Even better, you can just clone a Try .NET enabled repository with markdown files that have a few magic herbs and spices, then run "dotnet try" in that cloned folder.

What does this have to do with Polly, the lovely .NET resilience and transient fault handling library that YOU should be using every day? Well, my friends, check out this lovely bit of work by Bryan J Hogan! He's created some interactive workshop-style demos using Try .NET!

How easy is it to check out? Let's give it a try. I've run dotnet tool install --global dotnet-try already. You may need to run update if you've installed it a while back.

git clone https://github.com/bryanjhogan/trydotnet-polly.git
dotnet try

That's it. What does it do? It'll launch your browser to a local website powered by Try .NET that looks like this!

Sweet! Ah, but Dear Reader, scroll down! Let me try out one of the examples. You'll see a Monaco-based local text editor (the same edit that powers VS Code) and you're able to run - and modify - local code samples IN THE BROWSER!

Here's the code as text to make it more accessible.

RetryPolicy retryPolicy = Policy.Handle<Exception>()
    .Retry(3, (exception, retryCount) =>
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"{exception.GetType()} thrown, retrying {retryCount}.");
    });

int result = retryPolicy.Execute(() => errorProneCode.QueryTheDatabase());

Console.WriteLine($"Received a response of {result}.");

And the output appears below the sample, again, in a console within the browser:

System.Exception thrown, retrying 1.
System.InsufficientMemoryException thrown, retrying 2.
Received a response of 0.

You can see that Polly gives you a RetryPolicy that can envelop your code and handle things like transient errors, occasional flaky server responses, or whatever else you want it to do. It can be configured as a policy outside your code, or coded inline fluently like this.

NOTE the URL! See that it's a .MD or Markdown file? Try .NET has a special handler that reads in a regular markdown file and executes it. The result is an HTML representation of your Markdown *and* your sample, now executable!

What's the page/image above look like as Markdown? Like this:

# Polly Retries Part 2

### Retrying When an Exception Occurs
The Polly NuGet package has been added and we are going to use the Retry Policy when querying database. 
The policy states that if an exception occurs, it will retry up to three times.

Note how you execute the unreliable code inside the policy. `retryPolicy.Execute(() => errorProneCode.QueryTheDatabase());`


``` cs --region retryIfException --source-file .\src\Program.cs --project .\src\PollyDemo.csproj 
```

#### Next: [Retrying Based on a Result  »](./retryIfIncorrectStatus.md) Previous: [Before You Add Polly «](../lettingItFail.md)

Note the special ``` region. The code isn't inline, but rather it lives in a named region in Program.cs in a project in this same repository, neatly under the /src folder. The region is presented in the sample, but as samples are usually more complex and require additional libraries and such, the region name and project context is passed into your app as Try.NET executes it.

Go check out some Try .NET enabled sample repositories. Just make sure you have the Try .NET global tool installed, then go clone and "dotnet try" any of these!

• https://github.com/bryanjhogan/trydotnet-polly
• https://github.com/dotnet/try-samples (there's like 5 sample areas in here, do "dotnet try" in the different directories!)

If you're doing classwork, teaching workshops, making assignments for homework, or even working in a low-bandwidth or remote environment this is great as you can put the repositories on a USB key and once they've run once they'll run offline!

Now, be inspired by (and star on GitHub) Bryan's great work and go make your own interactive .NET documentation!

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 blogged about Patching the new Cascadia Code to include Powerline Glyphs and other Nerd Fonts for the Windows Terminal but folks have asked very specifically, how do I make my prompt look like that?

Step One - Get the Terminal

Get Windows Terminal free from the Store. You can also get it from GitHub's releases but I recommend the store because it'll stay up to date automatically.

Note that if you were an early adopter of the Windows Terminal and you've released updated beyond 0.5, I'd recommend you delete or zero-out your profiles.json and let the Terminal detect and automatically recreate your profiles.json.

Step Two for PowerShell - Posh-Git and Oh-My-Posh

Per these directions, install Posh-Git and Oh-My-Posh. This also assumes you've installed Git for Windows.

Install-Module posh-git -Scope CurrentUser
Install-Module oh-my-posh -Scope CurrentUser

Run these commands from PowerShell or PowerShell Core. I recommend PowerShell 6.2.3 or above. You can also use PowerShell on Linux too, so be aware. When you run Install-Module for the first time you'll get a warning that you're downloading and installing stuff from the internet so follow the prompts appropriately.

Also get PSReadline if you're on PowerShell Core:

Install-Module -Name PSReadLine -AllowPrerelease -Scope CurrentUser -Force -SkipPublisherCheck

Then run "notepad $PROFILE" and add these lines to the end:

Import-Module posh-git
Import-Module oh-my-posh
Set-PoshPrompt -Theme Paradox 

Now that word Paradox there is optional. It's actually the name of a theme and you can (and should!) pick the theme that makes you happy and use that theme's name here. I like Agnoster, Paradox, or Fish, myself. Read more over here. https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh

Step Two for Ubuntu/WSL

There's a number of choices for Powerline or Powerline-like prompts from Ubuntu. I like Powerline-Go for it's easy defaults.

I just installed Go, then installed powerline-go with go get.

sudo apt install golang-go
go get -u github.com/justjanne/powerline-go

Add this to your ~/.bashrc. You may already have a GOPATH so be aware.

GOPATH=$HOME/go
function _update_ps1() {
    PS1="$($GOPATH/bin/powerline-go -error $?)"
}
if [ "$TERM" != "linux" ] && [ -f "$GOPATH/bin/powerline-go" ]; then
    PROMPT_COMMAND="_update_ps1; $PROMPT_COMMAND"
fi

GOTCHA: If you are using WSL2, it'll be lightning fast with git prompts if your source code is in your Ubuntu/Linux mount, somewhere under ~/. However, if your source is under /mnt/c or /mnt anywhere, the git calls being made to populate the prompt are super slow. Be warned. Do your Linux source code/git work in the Linux filesystem for speed until WSL2 gets the file system faster under /mnt.

At this point your Ubuntu/WSL prompt will look awesome as well!

Fonts look weird? Uh oh!

Step Three - Get a better font

If you do all this and you see squares and goofy symbols, it's likely that the font you're using doesn't have the advanced Powerline glyphs. Those glyphs are the ones that make this prompt look so cool!

At the time of this writing there is active talk of getting Powerline and other Nerd Fonts into Cascadia Code, the new font that ships with Windows Terminal. In the short term, you can get a forked version of Cascadia Code called Delugia Code and download that.

Cascadia Code has been updated with a PL (Powerline) Glyph version! Go get it at https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/releases and change the fontFace in your settings.json to "Cascadia Code PL"

"fontFace":  "Cascadia Code PL"

Remember also you can get lots of Nerd Fonts at https://www.nerdfonts.com/, just make sure you get one (or generate one!) that includes PowerLine Glyphs.

Have fun!

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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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