Scott Hanselman

Technical Debt has a way of sneaking up on you. While my podcast site and the other 16ish sites I run all live in Azure and have a nice CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps, my main "Hanselman.com" series of sites and mini-sites has lagged behind. I'm still happy with its responsive design, but the underlying tech has started to get more difficult to manage and build and I've decided it's time to make some updates.

I want to be able to make these updates and have a clean switch over so that you, the reader, don't notice a difference. There's a number of things to think about when doing any migration like this, realizing it'll take some weeks (or months if you're a bigger company that just me).

• Continuous Deployment/Continuous Integration
• I host my code on GitHub and Azure DevOps now lets you log in with GitHub and does a fine job of building AND deploying your code (while running tests AND allowing for manual quality gates) so I want to make sure my sites have a nice clean "check in and go live" process.
• I'll also be using Azure App Services and Deployment Slots, so I'll have a dev/test/staging site and production, like a real professional. No more editing text files in production. Well, at least, I won't tell you when I'm editing text file in production.
• Technology Update
• Hanselman.com proper (not the blog) and the mini pages/sites underneath it run on ASP.NET 4.0 and WebForms. I was able to easily move the main site over to ASP.NET Razor Pages. Razor is just so elegant, as it's basically just HTML then you type @ and you're in C# (Razor). More on that below, but the upgrade was a day as the home page and minisites are largely readonly.
• The Blog, hosted at /blog will be more challenging given I don't want to break two decades years of URLs, along with the fact that it's running DasBlog on a recently upgraded .NET 4.0. DasBlog was originally made in .NET 1, then upgraded to .NET 2, so this is 17 years of technical debt.
• That said, the .NET Standard along with open source cross-platform .NET Core has allowed us - with the leadership of Mark Downie - to create DasBlog Core. DasBlog Core shares the core reliable (if crusty) engine of DasBlog along with an all new system of URL writing using ASP.NET Core middleware, as well as a complete re-do of the (well ahead of its time) DasBlog Theming Engine, now based on Razor Pages. It's brilliant. This is in active development.
• Azure Front Door
• Because I'm moving from a single machine running IIS to Azure, I'll want to split things apart to remove single points of failture. I'll use Azure Front Door to manage my URL structure and act as a front end cache as well as distribute traffic to multiple Azure App Services (Web Apps).
• URL management
• Are you changing your URLs and URL structure? Remember that URLs are UI and they matter. I've long wanted to remove the "aspx" extension from my URLs, as well as move the TitleCaseBlogPostThing to a more "modern" title-case-blog-post-thing style. I need to do this in a way that updates my google sitemap, breaks zero URLs, 301 redirects to the new style, and uses rel=canonical in a smart way.
• Shared Assets/CDNs/Front Door
• Since I run a family of sites, there's an opportunity to use a CDN as well and some clean CNAME DNS such that images.hanselman.com and images.hanselminutes.com can share assets. Since the Azure CDN is easy to setup and offers free SSL certs and pay-as-you go, I'll set both of those CNAMES up to point to the same Azure Storage where I'll keep images, show pics, CSS, and JS.

I'll be blogging the whole process. What do you want to hear/learn about?

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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 was working on DasBlog Core (an .NET Core cross-platform update of the ASP.NET WebForms-based blogging software that runs this blog) with Mark Downie, the new project manager, and Shayne Boyer. This is part of a larger cloud re-architecture of hanselman.com and the systems that run this whole site.

Shayne was working on getting a DasBlog Core CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Development) running in Azure DevOps' build system. We wanted individual build pipelines to confirm that DasBlog Core was in fact, cross-platform, so we needed to build, test, and run it on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

The build was working great on Windows and Mac...but failing on Linux. Why?

Well, like all things, it's complex.

• Windows has a case-insensitive file system.
• By default, Mac uses a case-insensitive file system.

Since Git 1.5ish there's been a setting

git config --global core.ignorecase true

but you should always be aware of what a setting does before you just set it.

If you're not careful, you or someone on your team can create a case sensitive file path in your git index while you're using a case insensitive operating system like Windows or Mac. If you do this, you'll be able to end up with two separate entries from git's perspective. However Windows will silently merge them and see just one.

Here's our themes folder structure as seen on GitHub.com.

But when we clone it on Mac or Windows, we see just one folder.

Turns out that six months ago one of us introduced another folder with the name dasblog while the original was DasBlog. When we checked them on Mac or Windows the files ended up in merged into one folder, but on Linux they were/are two, so the build fails.

You can fix this in a few ways. You can rename the file in a case-sensitive way and commit the change:

git mv --cached name.txt NAME.TXT

Please take care and back up anything you don't understand.

If you're renaming a directory, you'll do a two stage rename with a temp name.

git mv foo foo2
git mv foo2 FOO
git commit -m "changed case of dir"

Be safe out there!

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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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So, first, I'm having entirely too much fun with the new open source Windows Terminal. If you've got the latest version of Windows (go run Windows Update and do whatever it takes) then you can download the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store! This is a preview release (think v0.2) but it'll automatically update, often, from the Windows Store if you have Windows 10 version 18362.0 or higher.

One of the most fun things is that you can have background images. Even animated gifs! You can add those images in your Settings/profile.json like this.

"backgroundImage": "c:/users/scott/desktop/doug.gif",
"backgroundImageOpacity": 0.7,
"backgroundImageStretchMode": "uniformToFill

The profile.json is just JSON and you can update it. I could even update it programmatically if I wanted to parse it and mess about.

BUT. Enterprising developer Chris Duck created a lovely PowerShell Module called MSTerminalSettings that lets you very easily make Profile changes with script.

For example, Mac developers who use iTerm often go to https://iterm2colorschemes.com/ and get new color schemes for their consoles. Now Windows folks can as well!

From his docs, this example downloads the Pandora color scheme from https://iterm2colorschemes.com/ and sets it as the color scheme for the PowerShell Core terminal profile.

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes/master/schemes/Pandora.itermcolors' -OutFile .\Pandora.itermcolors
Import-Iterm2ColorScheme -Path .\Pandora.itermcolors -Name Pandora
Get-MSTerminalProfile -Name "PowerShell Core" | Set-MSTerminalProfile -ColorScheme Pandora

That's easy! Then I was talking to Tyler Leonhardt and suggested that we programmatically change the background using a folder full of Animated Gifs. I happen to have such a folder (with 2000 categorized gif classics) so we started coding and streamed the whole debacle on Tyler's Twitch!

The result is Windows Terminal Attract Mode and it's a hot mess and it is up on GitHub and all set up for PowerShell Core.

Remember that "Attract mode" is the mode an idle arcade cabinet goes into in order to attract passersby to play, so clearly the Terminal needs this also.

./AttractMode.ps1 -name "profile name" -path "c:\temp\trouble" -secs 5

It's a proof of concept for now, and it's missing background/runspace support, being wrapped up in a proper module, etc but the idea is solid, building on a solid base, with improvements to idiomatic PowerShell Core already incoming. Right now it'll run forever. Wrap it in Start-Job if you like as well and can stand it.

The next idea was to have reactions gifs to different developer situations. Break the build? Reaction Gif. Passing tests? Reaction Gif.

Here's a silly proof (not refactored) that aliases "dotnet build" to "db" with reactions.

#messing around with build reaction gifs

Function DotNetAlias {
    dotnet build
    if ($?) {
        Start-job -ScriptBlock {
            d:\github\TerminalAttractMode\SetMoodGif.ps1 "PowerShell Core" "D:\Dropbox\Reference\Animated Gifs\chrispratt.gif"                            
            Start-Sleep 1.5
            d:\github\TerminalAttractMode\SetMoodGif.ps1 "PowerShell Core" "D:\Dropbox\Reference\Animated Gifs\4003cn5.gif"                            
        } | Out-Null
    }
    else {
        Start-job -ScriptBlock {
            d:\github\TerminalAttractMode\SetMoodGif.ps1 "PowerShell Core" "D:\Dropbox\Reference\Animated Gifs\idk-girl.gif"                            
            Start-Sleep 1.5
            d:\github\TerminalAttractMode\SetMoodGif.ps1 "PowerShell Core" "D:\Dropbox\Reference\Animated Gifs\4003cn5.gif"                            
        } | Out-Null

    }
}

Set-Alias -Name db -value DotNetAlias

I added the Start-job stuff so that the build finishes and the Terminal returns control to you while the gifs still are updating. Runspace support would be smart as well.

Some other ideas? Giphy support. Random mood gifs. Pick me ups. You get the idea.

Later, Brandon Olin jumped in with this gem. Why not get a reaction gif if anything goes wrong in your last command? ERRORLEVEL 1? Explode.

Why are we doing this? Because it sparks joy, y'all.

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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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Last month Microsoft announced a new open source Windows Terminal! It's up at https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal and it's great, but for the last several weeks you've had to build it yourself as a Developer. It's been very v0.1 if you know what I mean.

Today you can download the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store! This is a preview release (think v0.2) but it'll automatically update, often, from the Windows Store if you have Windows 10 version 18362.0 or higher. Run "winver" to make sure.

If you don't see any tabs, hit Ctrl-T and note the + and the pull down menu at the top there. Under the menu go to Settings to open profiles.json. Here's mine on one machine.

Here's some Hot Windows Terminal Tips

You can do background images, even animated, with opacity (with useAcrylic off):

"backgroundImage": "c:/users/scott/desktop/doug.gif",
"backgroundImageOpacity": 0.7,
"backgroundImageStretchMode": "uniformToFill

You can edit the key bindings to your taste in the "key bindings" section. For now, be specific, so the * might be expressed as Ctrl+Shift+8, for example.

Try other things like cursor shape and color, history size, as well as different fonts for each tab.

 "cursorShape": "vintage"

If you're using WSL or WSL2, use the distro name like this in your new profile:

"wsl.exe -d Ubuntu-18.04"

If you like Font Ligatures or use Powerline, consider Fira Code as a potential new font.

I'd recommend you PIN terminal to your taskbar and start menu, but you can run windows terminal from the command "wt" from Windows R or from anotherc console. That's just "wt" and enter!

Try not just "Ctrl+Mouse Scroll" but also "Ctrl+Shift+Mouse Scroll" and get your your whole life!

Remember that the definition of a shell is someone fluid, so check out Azure Cloud Shell, in your terminal!

Also, let's start sharing nice color profiles! Share your new ones as a Gist in this format. Note the name.

{
  "background" : "#2C001E",
  "black" : "#4E9A06",
  "blue" : "#3465A4",
  "brightBlack" : "#555753",
  "brightBlue" : "#729FCF",
  "brightCyan" : "#34E2E2",
  "brightGreen" : "#8AE234",
  "brightPurple" : "#AD7FA8",
  "brightRed" : "#EF2929",
  "brightWhite" : "#EEEEEE",
  "brightYellow" : "#FCE94F",
  "cyan" : "#06989A",
  "foreground" : "#EEEEEE",
  "green" : "#300A24",
  "name" : "UbuntuLegit",
  "purple" : "#75507B",
  "red" : "#CC0000",
  "white" : "#D3D7CF",
  "yellow" : "#C4A000"
}

Note also that this should be the beginning of a wonderful Windows Console ecosystem. This isn't the one terminal to end them all, it's the one to start them all. I've loved alternative consoles for YEARS, whether it be ConEmu or Console2 many years ago, I've long declared that Text Mode is a missed opportunity.

Remember also that Terminal !== Shell and that you can bring your shell of choice into your Terminal of choice! If you want the deep architectural dive, be sure to watch the BUILD 2019 technical talk with some of the developers or read about ConPTY and how to integrate with it!

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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 putting part of older WebForms portions of my site that still run on bare metal to ASP.NET Core and Azure App Services, and while I'm doing that I realized that I want to make sure my staging sites don't get indexed by Google/Bing.

I already have a robots.txt, but I want one that's specific to production and others that are specific to development or staging. I thought about a number of ways to solve this. I could have a static robots.txt and another robots-staging.txt and conditionally copy one over the other during my Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline.

Then I realized the simplest possible thing would be to just make robots.txt be dynamic. I thought about writing custom middleware but that sounded like a hassle and more code that needed. I wanted to see just how simple this could be.

• You could do this as a single inline middleware, and just lambda and func and linq the heck out out it all on one line
• You could write your own middleware and do lots of options, then activate it bested on env.IsStaging(), etc.
• You could make a single Razor Page with environment taghelpers.

The last one seemed easiest and would also mean I could change the cshtml without a full recompile, so I made a RobotsTxt.cshtml single razor page. No page model, no code behind. Then I used the built-in environment tag helper to conditionally generate parts of the file. Note also that I forced the mime type to text/plain and I don't use a Layout page, as this needs to stand alone.

@page
@{
    Layout = null;
    this.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";
}
# /robots.txt file for http://www.hanselman.com/
User-agent: *
<environment include="Development,Staging">Disallow: /</environment>
<environment include="Production">Disallow: /blog/private
Disallow: /blog/secret
Disallow: /blog/somethingelse</environment>

I then make sure that my Staging and/or Production systems have ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT variables set appropriately.

I also want to point out what may look like odd spacing and how some text is butted up against the TagHelpers. Remember that a TagHelper's tag sometimes "disappears" (is elided) when it's done its thing, but the whitespace around it remains. So I want User-agent: * to have a line, and then Disallow to show up immediately on the next line. While it might be prettier source code to have that start on another line, it's not a correct file then. I want the result to be tight and above all, correct. This is for staging:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This now gives me a robots.txt at /robotstxt but not at /robots.txt. See the issue? Robots.txt is a file (or a fake one) so I need to map a route from the request for /robots.txt to the Razor page called RobotsTxt.cshtml.

Here I add a RazorPagesOptions in my Startup.cs with a custom PageRoute that maps /robots.txt to /robotstxt. (I've always found this API annoying as the parameters should, IMHO, be reversed like ("from","to") so watch out for that, lest you waste ten minutes like I just did.

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddMvc()
        .AddRazorPagesOptions(options =>
    {
        options.Conventions.AddPageRoute("/robotstxt", "/Robots.Txt");
    });
}

And that's it! Simple and clean.

You could also add caching if you wanted, either as a larger middleware, or even in the cshtml Page, like

context.Response.Headers.Add("Cache-Control", $"max-age=SOMELARGENUMBEROFSECONDS");

but I'll leave that small optimization as an exercise to the reader.

UPDATE: After I was done I found this robots.txt middleware and NuGet up on GitHub. I'm still happy with my code and I don't mind not having an external dependency, but it's nice to file this one away for future more sophisticated needs and projects.

How do you handle your robots.txt needs? Do you even have one?

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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.

About   Newsletter

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