Category: Useful tool

ClosedXML – .NET library for Excel files

ClosedXML is a .NET library for reading, manipulating and writing Excel 2007+ (.xlsx, .xlsm) files. It aims to provide an intuitive and user-friendly interface to dealing with the underlying OpenXML API.

Source: ClosedXML
License: MIT / Open source project
Doc: https://closedxml.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Wiki: https://github.com/closedxml/closedxml/wiki

ClosedXML is a wrapper of the offical .NET Open XML SDK:
https://github.com/dotnet/Open-XML-SDK

Top 9 GitHub Copilot alternatives (code completion tools) to try in 2022 (free and paid)

GitHub Copilot is a code completion tool from GitHub and OpenAI. It employs OpenAI’s Codex, a transformer trained on billions of code lines on GitHub, to auto-generate code based on the current file’s contents and your cursor location. Copilot is compatible with popular code editors like Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs and offers support for languages like Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.

According to GitHub and user reviews, Copilot can generate whole code lines, functions, tests, and documentation. All it needs is context and the behind-the-scenes work of developers who committed their code to GitHub, regardless of their software license.

When the Copilot beta ended, GitHub released the pricing for individual users. The subscription included a 60-day free trial, which would turn to $10/month or $100/year per user.

Source: Top 9 GitHub Copilot alternatives to try in 2022 (free and paid)

Fine Code Coverage – Visual Studio Marketplace

Visualize unit test code coverage easily for free in Visual Studio Community Edition (and other editions too)

Coverage View
Source: Fine Code Coverage – Visual Studio Marketplace

Usage:

  1. Install
  2. Open the Fine Code Coverage window
  3. Run all unit tests
  4. See stats in Fine Code Coverage window
  5. Exclude the test project itself from coverage calculation:

    (Below excludes project that ends with .Test and all its types (*

Pattern: [assemblyname]type

Filter Expressions:

Wildcards
* => matches zero or more characters
		
Examples
[*]* => All types in all assemblies (nothing is instrumented)
[coverlet.*]Coverlet.Core.Coverage => The Coverage class in the Coverlet.Core namespace belonging to any assembly that matches coverlet.* (e.g coverlet.core)
[*]Coverlet.Core.Instrumentation.* => All types belonging to Coverlet.Core.Instrumentation namespace in any assembly
[coverlet.*.tests]* => All types in any assembly starting with coverlet. and ending with .tests

Both 'Exclude' and 'Include' options can be used together but 'Exclude' takes precedence.

Using telnet as a tool for troubleshooting network port connections

Note that you may need to enable telnet on your workstation (see this Article: How to enable telnet for troubleshooting when CMD reports: “‘telnet’ is not recognized as an internal or external command”)

Once you have telnet enabled, follow these steps:

  1. Open a command prompt
  2. Type in “telnet <IP ADDRESS OF SERVER PC> <PORT>” and press enter.
  3. For example, you would type “telnet 123.45.67.89 1521”
  4. If a blank screen appears then the port is open, and the test is successful.
  5. If you receive a connecting… message or an error message then something is blocking that port.  It could be the Windows firewall, a third party firewall like your anti-virus software, or an institutional hardware firewall between the workstation and the server.

Source: Using telnet as a tool for troubleshooting connection problems on hosted Voyager servers – Ex Libris Knowledge Center

Find out which process is locking a file or folder in Windows

You can use the Resource Monitor for this which comes built-in with Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11! Open Resource Monitor, which can be found By searching for Resource Monitor or resmon.exe in the start menu, or As a button on the Performance tab in your Task Manager Go to the CPU tab Use the search field in the Associated Handles section See blue arrow in screen shot below When you’ve found the handle, you can identify the process by looking at the Image and/or PID column. You can then try to close the application as you normally would, or, if that’s not possible, just right-click the handle and kill the process directly from there. Easy peasy!

Resource Monitor screenshot

Source: filesystems – Find out which process is locking a file or folder in Windows – Super User

SharpLab Online Tool – Reveal what happens during compilation of C#

SharpLab is a .NET code playground that shows intermediate steps and results of code compilation. Some language features are thin wrappers on top of other features — e.g. using() becomes try/finally. SharpLab allows you to see the code as compiler sees it, and get a better understanding of .NET languages.

Recent versions include experimental support for running code, with some limitations.

Online tool: SharpLab

Readme: https://discoverdot.net/projects/sharplab

My Ultimate PowerShell prompt with Oh My Posh and the Windows Terminal – Scott Hanselman’s Blog

I’ve long blogged about my love of setting up a nice terminal, getting the prompt just right, setting my colors, fonts, glyphs, and more. Here’s some of my posts.
…

I want to take a moment to update my pretty prompt post with a little more detail and a more complex PowerShell $PROFILE, due to some changes in Oh My Posh, PowerShell, and the Windows Terminal. I doubt that this post is perfect and I’m sure there’s stuff here that is a little extra. But I like it, and this post will serve as my “setting up a new machine” post until I get around to writing a script to do all this for me in one line.

I love my prompt.

A pretty prompt in Terminal with Oh My Posh and a lot of Colors
Pre made script to make it look like Scott Hanselmans example prompt:
https://github.com/springcomp/my-box

Source: My Ultimate PowerShell prompt with Oh My Posh and the Windows Terminal – Scott Hanselman’s Blog