Original title was “Monads solve a problem you might not have, but it’s a nice problem to have”, which is an homage to a great post by Krzysztof Koźmic about IoC containers.

I can’t think of another 5-letter word that strikes fear in the hearts of so many developers, coming from an object-oriended/imperative language to a functional one. So much so, this, and other M-words are outright banned on some resources.

This post will not attempt to explain monads, at least, not on purpose. This fantastic post by Max Kreminski does this better than I ever could - by showing that most “monad tutorials” (or, educational blog posts in general) have problem-solution ordering issues. Please take a moment to read this wonderful post before continuing.

Layered architectures were good, until they weren’t. Someone said ORMs, and we were tearing out our SQL statements in favor of magic.

ORMs were good, until they weren’t. You couldn’t use the generated entities in your presentation layers, because they knew too much. Someone said DTOs.

Sometime in 2011, I’ve seen a cool feature of Castle Windsor IoC container - the ability to create typed factories based on an interface, without any implementation. That day I realized 2 things: a) containers are magic, and b) such magic would never be allowed in production.

I recently started a shiny new job, and got a shiny new Macbook Pro to go with it. Having spent most of my personal and professional life on Windows, I knew that an adjustment period would have to follow. Below are my impressions, the good, bad, and the ugly side of adjusting to One Cupertino Way after a lifetime on Windows.

I was finally able to migrate from WordPress to a gorgeous, static, and blazing fast blog, hosted on GitHub Pages for free. Here is a recap of what I did, starting with exporting all data from WordPress, and finishing with setting up an automatic publishing with AppVeyor!

Let’s begin!

I’m writing this post mainly to myself, explaining how I figured out why this particular Windows Update package was failing to install on my Windows 10 (installation began, then rolled back). This can serve as a general troubleshooting step when google searches lead you nowhere.

I decided to get with the times, and get myself a mid-level ultraportable machine I can carry around while traveling. Knowing almost nothing about this category of computers (and having avoided touch-enabled hybrids/tables until now), I spent considerable time researching. My requirements were simple:

• a secondary machine (my 3 year old behemoth HP EliteBook 8570w is still the best development machine I’ve got)
• light, portable (so, about 13”), touch-enabled (most of them are, anyway)
• good typing experience (I considered a Surface 3/4 with Type Cover keyboard, but typing experience got mixed reviews)
• $1000 or less

It’s time to upgrade your favorite IDE! In this post I will list some of my favorite “off-the-beaten-path” extensions for Visual Studio that make my daily tasks much easier. I will not list the obvious ones, such as ReSharper and OzCode (or even Web Essentials), but rather few relatively unknown ones that do some very cool things.

Are you ready? Let’s begin!

This post explains how to prevent a certain update from installing on a Windows 10 machine (at the time of writing, build 10049). The information below might not be accurate/relevant for future updates.

Note: this post assumes some knowledge developing Visual Studio Extensions (VSIX).

Suppose you’re developing custom tooling that enhances (or otherwise modifies) current project types (for example, C# class libraries or Web applications). This is most commonly done by specifying custom MSBuild properties, typically by adding a .targets file to the project file itself (possibly via NuGet, which can import .targets files automatically).

One common way to interact with those custom properties is by adding a page in the project properties, however, most documentation about extending project properties refers to creating your own project systems. Any documentation about extending existing projects is either out of date, or nonexistent.