Scott Hanselman

In 2016 and 2015 I made a list of best Christmas STEM Toys for kids! If I may say so, they are still good lists today, so do check them out. Be aware I use Amazon referral links so I get a little kickback (and you support this blog!) when you use these links. I'll be using the pocket money to...wait for it...buy STEM toys for kids! So thanks in advance!

Here's a Christmas List of things that I've either personally purchased, tried for a time, or borrowed from a friend. These are great toys and products for kids of all genders and people of all ages.

Piper Computer Kit with Minecraft Raspberry Pi edition

The Piper is a little spendy at first glance, but it's EXTREMELY complete and very thoughtfully created. Sure, you can just get a Raspberry Pi and hack on it - but the Piper is not just a Pi. It's a complete kit where your little one builds their own wooden "laptop" box (more of a luggable), and then starting with just a single button, builds up the computer. The Minecraft content isn't just vanilla Microsoft. It's custom episodic content! Custom voice overs, episodes, and challenges.

What's genius about Piper, though, is how the software world interacts with the hardware. For example, at one point you're looking for treasure on a Minecraft beach. The Piper suggests you need a treasure detector, so you learn about wiring and LEDs and wire up a treasure detector LED while it's running. Then you run your Minecraft person around while the LED blinks faster to detect treasure. It's absolute genius. Definitely a favorite in our house for the 8-12 year old set.

Suspend! by Melissa and Doug

Suspend is becoming the new Jenga for my kids. The game doesn't look like much if you judge a book by its cover, but it's addictive and my kids now want to buy a second one to see if they can build even higher. An excellent addition to family game night.

Engino Discovering Stem: Levers, Linkages & Structures Building Kit

I love LEGO but I'm always trying new building kids. Engino is reminiscent of Technics or some of the advanced LEGO elements, but this modestly priced kit is far more focused - even suitable for incorporating into home schooling.

Gravity Maze

I've always wanted a 3D Chess Set. Barring that, check out Gravity Maze. It's almost like a physical version of a well-designed iPad game. It included 60 challenges (levels) that you then add pieces to in order to solve. It gets harder than you'd think, fast! If you like this, also check out Circuit Maze.

Osmo Genius Kit (2017)

Osmo is an iPad add-on that takes the ingenious idea of an adapter that lets your iPad see the tabletop (via a mirror/lens) and then builds on that clever concept with a whole series of games, exercises, and core subject tests. It's best for the under 12 set - I'd say it's ideal for about 6-8 year olds.

Sponsor: Check out JetBrains Rider: a new cross-platform .NET IDE. Edit, refactor, test and debug ASP.NET, .NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin or Unity applications. Learn more and download a 30-day trial!

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

Hosting By

I'm glad you have a 1080p 60fps accelerated graphics setup, but I'm old school. Impress me with a really nice polished ASCII progress bar or spinner!

I received two tips this week about cool .NET Core ready progress bars so I thought I'd try them out.

ShellProgressBar by Martijn Laarman

This one is super cool. It even supports child progress bars for async stuff happening in parallel! It's very easy to use. I was able to get a nice looking progress bar going in minutes.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    const int totalTicks = 100;
    var options = new ProgressBarOptions
    {
        ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Yellow,
        ForegroundColorDone = ConsoleColor.DarkGreen,
        BackgroundColor = ConsoleColor.DarkGray,
        BackgroundCharacter = '\u2593'
    };
    using (var pbar = new ProgressBar(totalTicks, "Initial message", options))
    {
            pbar.Tick(); //will advance pbar to 1 out of 10.
            //we can also advance and update the progressbar text
            pbar.Tick("Step 2 of 10");
            TickToCompletion(pbar, totalTicks, sleep: 50); 
    }
}

Boom.

Be sure to check out the examples for ShellProgressBar, specifically ExampleBase.cs where he has some helper stuff like TickToCompletion() that isn't initially obvious.

Kurukuru by Mayuki Sawatari

Another nice progress system that is in active development for .NET Core (like super active...I can see they updated code an hour ago!) is called Kurukuru. This code is less about progress bars and more about spinners. It's smart about Unicode vs. non-Unicode as there's a lot of cool characters you could use in a Unicode-aware console that make for attractive spinners.

Kurukuru is also super easy to use and integrated into your code. It also uses the "using" disposable pattern in a clever way. Wrap your work and if you throw an exception, it will show a failed spinner.

Spinner.Start("Processing...", () =>
{
    Thread.Sleep(1000 * 3);
    
    // MEMO: If you want to show as failed, throw a exception here.
    // throw new Exception("Something went wrong!");
});

Spinner.Start("Stage 1...", spinner =>
{
    Thread.Sleep(1000 * 3);
    spinner.Text = "Stage 2...";
    Thread.Sleep(1000 * 3);
    spinner.Fail("Something went wrong!");
});

TIP: If your .NET Core console app wants to use an async Main (like I did) and call Kurukuru's async methods, you'll want to indicate you want to use the latest C# 7.1 features by adding this to your project's *.csproj file:

<PropertyGroup>
    <LangVersion>latest</LangVersion>
</PropertyGroup>

This allowed me to do this:

public static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
    await Spinner.StartAsync("Stage 1...", async spinner =>
    {
        await Task.Delay(1000 * 3);
        spinner.Text = "Stage 2...";
        await Task.Delay(1000 * 3);
        spinner.Fail("Something went wrong!");
    });
}

Did I miss some? I'm sure I did. What nice ASCII progress bars and spinners make YOU happy?

And again, as with all Open Source, I encourage you to HELP OUT! I know the authors would appreciate it.

Sponsor: Check out JetBrains Rider: a new cross-platform .NET IDE. Edit, refactor, test and debug ASP.NET, .NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin or Unity applications. Learn more and download a 30-day trial!

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

Hosting By

Visual Studio Code has a HUGE extension library. There's also almost two dozen very nice Azure specific extensions as well as extensions for Docker, etc. If you write an Azure extension yourself, you can depend on the Azure Account Extension to handle the administrivia of the user logging into Azure and selecting their subscription. And of course, the Azure Account Extension is open source.

Here's the cool part - I think, since I just learned it. You can have the Azure Account Extension installed (again, you can install it directly or you can get it as a dependency) you also get the ability to get an Azure Cloud Shell directly inside VS Code. That means a little container spins up in the Cloud and you can get a real bash shell or a real PowerShell shell quickly. AND the Azure Cloud Shell automatically is logged in as you and already has a ton of tools pre-installed.

Here's how you do it.

• Install Visual Studio Code
• Install the Azure Account Extension
• run VS Code, then press Shift-Ctrl-P for the Command Palette
• Click Azure: Sign In

It will pop up a message with a "copy & open" button. It'll launch a browser, then you enter a special code after logging into Azure to OAuth VS Code into your Account account.

At this point, open a Cloud Shell with Shift-Ctrl-P and type "Bash" or "PowerShell"...it'll autocomplete so you can type a lot less, or setup a hotkey.

Your Cloud Shell will appear along side your local terminals!

Note that there's a "clouddrive" folder mapped to your Azure Storage so you can keep stuff in there. Even though the Shell goes away in about 20 min of non-use, your stuff (scripts, whatever) is persisted.

There's a bunch of tools preinstalled you can use as well!

scott@Azure:~$ node --version
v6.9.4
scott@Azure:~$ dotnet --version
2.0.0
scott@Azure:~$ git --version
git version 2.7.4
scott@Azure:~$ python --version
Python 3.5.2
scott@Azure:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
Release:        16.04
Codename:       xenial

And finally, when you type "azure" or "az" for the various Azure CLI (Command Line Interface) tools, you'll find you're already authenticated/logged into Azure, so you can create VMs, list websites, manage Kubenetes clusters, all from within VS Code. I'm still exploring, but I'm enjoying what I'm seeing.

Sponsor: Scale your Python for big data & big science with Intel® Distribution for Python. Near-native code speed. Use with NumPy, SciPy & scikit-learn. Get it 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

Hosting By

I got an email this week asking how to download some of my Azure Friday video podcast videos from http://friday.azure.com as well as some of the Getting Started Videos from Azure.com.

NOTE: Respect copyright and consider what you’re doing and WHY before you use this technique to download videos that may have been embedded for a reason.

I told them to download the videos with F12 tools, and they weren't clear how. I'll use an Azure Friday video for the example. Do be aware that there are a ton of ways to embed video on the web and this doesn't get around ones that REALLY don't want to be downloaded. This won't help you with Netflix, Hulu, etc.

First, I'll visit the site with the video I want in my browser. I'll use Chrome but this also works in Edge or Firefox with slightly different menus.

Then press F12 to bring up the Developer Tools pane and click Network. In Edge, click Content Type, then Media.

Click the "clear" button to set up your workspace. That's the International No button there in the Network pane. Now, press Play and get ready.

Look in the Media list for something like ".mp4" or something that looks like the video you want. It'll likely have an HTTP Response in the 20x range.

In Chrome, right click on the URL and select Copy as CURL. If you're on Windows pick cmd.exe and bash if you're on Linux/Mac.

You'll get a crazy long command put into your clipboard. It's not all needed but it's a very convenient feature the browser provides, so it's worth using.

Get Curl: If you don't have the "curl" command you'll want to download "curl.exe" from here https://curl.haxx.se/dlwiz/ and, if you like, put it in your PATH. If you have Windows, get the free bundled curl version with installer here.

Open a terminal/command prompt - run cmd.exe on Windows - and paste in the command. If the browser you're using only gives you the URL and not the complete "curl" command, the command you're trying to build is basically curl [url] -o [outputfile.mp4]. It's best if you can get the complete command like the one Chrome provides, as it may include authentication cookies or other headers that omitting may prevent your download from working.

GOTCHA: Make sure to remove the -H "Range:" headers (if any) to ensure you get the FULL download and not just a range of bytes!

BEFORE you press enter, make sure you add "-o youroutputfilename.mp4." Also, if you can an error about security and certificates, you may need to add "--insecure."

In the screenshot above I'm saving the file as "test.mp4" on my desktop.

There are several ways to download embedded videos, including a number of online utilities that come and go, but this technique has been very reliable for me.

Sponsor: Scale your Python for big data & big science with Intel® Distribution for Python. Near-native code speed. Use with NumPy, SciPy & scikit-learn. Get it 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

Hosting By

There's a couple of great utilities that have come out in the last few weeks in the .NET Core world that you should be aware of. They are deeply useful when porting/writing cross-platform code.

.NET API Analyzer

First is the API Analyzer. As you know, APIs sometimes get deprecated, or you'll use a method on Windows and find it doesn't work on Linux. The API Analyzer is a Roslyn (remember Roslyn is the name of the C#/.NET compiler) analyzer that's easily added to your project as a NuGet package. All you have to do is add it and you'll immediately start getting warnings and/or squiggles calling out APIs that might be a problem.

Check out this quick example. I'll make a quick console app, then add the analyzer. Note the version is current as of the time of this post. It'll change.

C:\supercrossplatapp> dotnet new console
C:\supercrossplatapp> dotnet add package Microsoft.DotNet.Analyzers.Compatibility --version 0.1.2-alpha

Then I'll use an API that only works on Windows. However, I still want my app to run everywhere.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

    if (RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Windows))
    {
        var w = Console.WindowWidth;
        Console.WriteLine($"Console Width is {w}");
    }
}

Then I'll "dotnet build" (or run, which implies build) and I get a nice warning that one API doesn't work everywhere.

C:\supercrossplatapp> dotnet build

Program.cs(14,33): warning PC001: Console.WindowWidth isn't supported on Linux, MacOSX [C:\Users\scott\Desktop\supercr
ossplatapp\supercrossplatapp.csproj]
  supercrossplatapp -> C:\supercrossplatapp\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\supercrossplatapp.dll

Build succeeded.

Olia from the .NET Team did a great YouTube video where she shows off the API Analyzer and how it works. The code for the API Analyzer up here on GitHub. Please leave an issue if you find one!

Windows Compatibility Pack for .NET Core

Second, the Windows Compatibility Pack for .NET Core is a nice piece of tech. When .NET Core 2.0 come out and the .NET Standard 2.0 was finalized, it included over 32k APIs that made it extremely compatible with existing .NET Framework code. In fact, it's so compatible, I was able to easily take a 15 year old .NET app and port it over to .NET Core 2.0 without any trouble at all.

They have more than doubled the set of available APIs from 13k in .NET Standard 1.6 to 32k in .NET Standard 2.0.

.NET Standard 2.0 is cool because it's supported on the following platforms:

• .NET Framework 4.6.1
• .NET Core 2.0
• Mono 5.4
• Xamarin.iOS 10.14
• Xamarin.Mac 3.8
• Xamarin.Android 7.5

When you're porting code over to .NET Core that has lots of Windows-specific dependencies, you might find yourself bumping into APIs that aren't a part of .NET Standard 2.0. So, there's a new (preview) Microsoft.Windows.Compatibility NuGet package that "provides access to APIs that were previously available only for .NET Framework."

There will be two kinds of APIs in the Compatibility Pack. APIs that were a part of Windows originally but can work cross-platform, and APIs that will always be Windows only, because they are super OS-specific. APIs calls to the Windows Registry will always be Windows-specific, for example. But the System.DirectoryServices or System.Drawing APIs could be written in a way that works anywhere. The Windows Compatibility Pack adds over 20,000 more APIs, on top of what's already available in .NET Core. Check out the great video that Immo shot on the compat pack.

The point is, if the API that is blocking you from using .NET Core is now available in this compat pack, yay! But you should also know WHY you are pointing to .NET Core. Work continues on both .NET Core and .NET (Full) Framework on Windows. If your app works great today, there's no need to port unless you need a .NET Core specific feature. Here's a great list of rules of thumb from the docs:

Use .NET Core for your server application when:+

• You have cross-platform needs.
• You are targeting microservices.
• You are using Docker containers.
• You need high-performance and scalable systems.
• You need side-by-side .NET versions per application.

Use .NET Framework for your server application when:

• Your app currently uses .NET Framework (recommendation is to extend instead of migrating).
• Your app uses third-party .NET libraries or NuGet packages not available for .NET Core.
• Your app uses .NET technologies that aren't available for .NET Core.
• Your app uses a platform that doesn’t support .NET Core.

Finally, it's worth pointing out a few other tools that can aid you in using the right APIs for the job.

• Api Portability Analyzer - command line tool or Visual Studio Extension, a toolchain that can generate a report of how portable your code is between .NET Framework and .NET Core, with an assembly-by-assembly breakdown of issues. See Tooling to help you on the process for more information.
• Reverse Package Search - A useful web service that allows you to search for a type and find packages containing that type.

Enjoy!

Sponsor: Get the latest JetBrains Rider preview for .NET Core 2.0 support, Value Tracking and Call Tracking, MSTest runner, new code inspections and refactorings, and the Parallel Stacks view in debugger.

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

Hosting By