Publishing to GitHub from Visual Studio

This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Those who follow me on Twitter (@markwilsonit) may be aware that I’m attempting to learn some C# skills in my spare time (what little of that I have).  It’s not my first foray into coding – I have a Computer Studies degree and, in my youth I wrote code in a variety of languages (BASIC, C, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, 68000 assembler, COBOL, Visual Basic, C++ and probably some others too) but aside from a little bit of C++ on the Arduino and the odd bit of PowerShell, I haven’t done much in the last 20 years.  As my career moves further towards management I’m increasingly convinced it’s technology I enjoy though – and I’m seriously considering a move from infrastructure to software…

Anyway…

I’ve been following a Pluralsight C# course from Scott Allen (@ode2code) and, part way through, Scott uses System.Speech to demonstrate adding references to assemblies.  I had a play, adapting something I’d written earlier to talk to me as well as output to the console – nothing grand – just a bit of fun.  After showing it to my sons, the eldest (who is 9), described it as “epic” (which I understand is pretty good) and I tweeted, only to be amused by a reply which suggested the same library had caused hilarity in Duncan Smart (@DuncanSmart)’s household:

Small world, eh!

I followed the link to Duncan’s code and thought “Hmm… GitHub… I use that for my Arduino code… I wonder if…” – and yes, Visual Studio can publish to GitHub too.  It took some work to suss it out though, so here’s what I did (following advice on StackOverflow)…

  1. In Visual Studio, select File then Add to Source Control (which creates a local Git repository)
  2. On GitHub, create a new reposotory (but don’t initialise it with a README – Visual Studio wants an empty repository.
  3. Copy the HTTPS URI for the new repo, then go back to Visual Studio, open Team Explorer, select Home then Unsynced Commits and enter the GitHub URL before clicking Publish.
  4. You may find that you have to commit the changes locally first, which in my case required creating a local username and supplying an email address.
  5. After committing, the solution should be visible on GitHub.

For reference, I was using Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop.

Short takes: text editing; Windows Phone; and recovering deleted images…

This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

More snippets from the life of a geek playing at being a manager in the IT industry…

Replacing text with a carriage return/line feed in Windows Notepad

It’s a long story but I needed to find out how many people are in our department, at a level above me.  My manager is on holiday, so I couldn’t ask him. Instead, I drafted an email to the whole department, expanded the distribution list and then counted the names…

Of course I didn’t quite do it like that… I pasted the list into a text file (which I thought I’d import to Excel as a CSV and then count the number of rows). That didn’t work out (I got 111 columns instead and I lost count shortly after AA, AB, AC, etc.) so I tried replacing the “; ” with line feeds in Notepad. Notepad can’t do that, but Word canCtrl+H will open the find and replace dialogue and using ^p as the string for the replacement will insert a new paragraph mark. 111 replacements were made (hence 111 names).

Changing the voicemail number on my Windows Phone

One of the issues with my iPhone is that I can’t change the voicemail number from 901 (O2 – the network my phone thinks it’s on) to 443 (Giffgaff – the MVNO that my account is actually with).  I’ve jailbroken and hacked around with config files but it doesn’t work on iOS 7.0.4.

Thankfully, my Nokia Lumia 625 (running Windows Phone 8) is a little more flexible.  When new, it asked me what the voicemail number I needed was.  In the absence of any information from my service provider (EE), I googled and found information that suggested it was +447953222222. My IT department later suggested I should use +447973100123 and changing it is as simple as hitting the ... in the phone app and entering settings, then changing the voicemail number.  As my messages are still intact, I guess that both numbers actually end up in the same location…

Turning off Twitter’s lock screen updates on Windows Phone

Talking of Windows Phone, when I installed the Twitter app it asked if I wanted to see selected tweets on my lock screen.  It seemed like a good idea at first, until I realised I couldn’t actually click on them.  Turning off the Twitter lock screen updates was difficult to hunt down – it’s not set via the Twitter app settings but in the lock screen settings, as Jamie Thomson (@jamiet) and Craig Hawker (@craighawker) highlighted to me.  Thanks guys.

Recovering deleted images from a camera flash drive

Of course, any of us who work in IT know that we automatically get to provide a family IT support service.  I shouldn’t complain because, after my parents in-law paid for someone to do some work on their PC I was horrified to see that he had removed Microsoft Security Essentials and added AVG (which I had removed because it kept nagging to upgrade to a paid version), installed a load of unnecessary software (Defraggler, Firefox, etc.).  My “keep it simple, stupid” approach to septuagenarian IT had been destroyed by someone who wanted to inflict his way of computing on others.

Anyway, back to the point…

…My Mother in-law was disappointed to find she was missing some images on her digital camera.  She swears the camera did it by itself (I suggest it was user error) but, critically, no new pictures had been taken since.  Following advice from PC Advisor, I used a free application called Recuva to restore the deleted files on the memory card (ironically, from the same software company that creates Defraggler, the tool I said was unnecessary a little earlier).  It was beautifully simple, although I was unable to get Windows to recognise the camera as a drive (it does depend on the camera) and had to mess around with card readers instead.

Stuck door lock on Mk5 Volkswagen Golf

This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My wife’s ’08 registration Volkswagen Golf (Mk5) refused to unlock the rear passenger door earlier this week.  After trying various combinations of keyfobs, inside door locks, locking and unlocking, I hit the ‘net and found a multitude of articles with various bits of advice – usually resulting in trying to remove door trims and expensive garage bills.  I did find one post on the Mk5 Golf GTI forum that looked hopeful though (even though ours is a Match not a GTI!) and decided it was worth a try:

“You do need two people.

One operates the central lock switch on the drivers door while the other tries to open the passenger door. You try and open the door at the same time as it tries to unlock.

Can take ages.”

I tried this a few times with the outside handle (I could hear the lock “clunking” but the door still wouldn’t open) then I tried with the inside handle a couple of times and – hey presto, an open door!  I think the mechanism could do with some grease (not sure what sort), but seems to be working at the moment.

Internet search saves Mark a couple of hundred quid at the local Volkswagen dealer…

Fighting with formulae in Excel

This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Excel. Love it, or hate it, there are few of us in white collar jobs who don’t have to grapple with it from time to time and, earlier this evening, after OneNote had yet again decided that syncing shared notebooks via our ageing SharePoint platform as not going to work, I needed to come up with a new way of storing actions and decisions for the management team I’m one member of.

I would have liked to create a SharePoint task list but I don’t have the necessary permissions, or the inclination to find out who can give me them (and then to justify why I need to do this). Which led me back to the tool upon which so many business processes are built: Excel.

On the way, I grappled with some formulae, so I decided to knock up some notes for the next time this happens – or the next person who needs to do something similar…

Nested IFs, SEARCHes and ISERRORs

My Excel workbook is simple: two tabs (“Decisions” and “Actions”).  The Decisions tab looks after itself: three columns with a date, a decision, and the rationale behind it.  Actions is a little more complex (read over-engineered).  I have date, status, action, owner, target date, and notes. Then I want the status to be auto-populated based on the notes (If the notes say complete, then status is “Completed”; if the notes include the word cancelled then the status is “Cancelled”, otherwise the status is “Open”).

This was the first challenge.  Excel doesn’t have an ELSE in its IF function, but you can nest IFs as follows:

IF(logical_test, [value_if_true], (IF(logical_test, [value_if_true], [value_if_false]))

(or use one of the LOOKUP functions).  I combined this with the SEARCH function to look for instances of the word “Cancelled” in the notes and everything was working well with results returned for a match on “Complete”, or an instance of “Cancelled” but then the catch all value if false always returned a #VALUE! error.

As SEARCH will always return #VALUE! if the search string is not present, I started to look for workarounds.  Some googling told me that I need to test for an error condition with the ISERROR function but that didn’t seem to solve the issue. So I reversed the logic – check for the error first andthen take action accordingly:

=IF(F2="Complete", "Completed", IF(ISERROR(SEARCH("Cancelled",F2))=TRUE,"Open", IF(SEARCH("Cancelled",F2), "Cancelled")))

It may be easier to understand this in some form of pseudocode:

IF cellvalue="Complete"
{
status = "Completed"
}
ELSE
{
IF cellvalue doesn't contain "Cancelled"
{
status = "Open"
}
ELSE
{
IF cellvalue contains "Cancelled"
{
status = "Cancelled"
}
}
}

Conditional formatting based on cell contents

The next thing I wanted to do was to format each item in the action list according to it’s status and/or date. I wanted to colour completed actions grey; mark cancelled actions as grey and strikethrough the font, then add a red/amber/green status on open actions according to the target date. Conditional formatting did the trick here but I wasn’t sure how to highlight a row based on the contents of one cell in the row.

I found the answer on the HowToGeek site and key to this is not worrying that the reference to the cell used to test the logic is a single cell – Excel is smart enough to work out that you need the same column on the next row when evaluating the condition there.

So, I ended up with six rules, three of which use the TODAY function to evaluate whether the task is overdue or not (or due today):

Formula Format
=$B2="Cancelled" AaBbCcYyZz
=$B2="Completed" AaBbCcYyZz
=$E2="" No format set
=$E2<TODAY() AaBbCcYyZz
=$E2=TODAY() AaBbCcYyZz
=$E2>TODAY() AaBbCcYyZz

It may all be a bit OTT, but I for one work in a very visual manner – I need documents to show me something, not just rely on reading the text.  Hopefully this will work out to be a useful tool for us…