I’ve taken some inspiration from my friend Suze Hinton, with a little encouragement from my other friends Carl and Richard, and started streaming some live coding exercises.  I’m going on Twitch and showing my Visual Studio along with a camera on my face and writing some code.  You can find my stream at https://twitch.tv/csharpfritz go ahead over there and click the follow button so that you can receive notifications of when I’m going online.

My First Twitch Stream

On today’s stream, I wanted to configure continuous integration for my current open source project, Fritz.ConfigurationBuilders.  I tried setting up Visual Studio Team Services, but ran into an issue where the build agents don’t yet have .NET Framework 4.7.1 installed and ready to go.  Instead, I reverted to using AppVeyor and used their service for open source projects to build my project whenever there is a change in GitHub.

I’m not sure yet how frequently I’ll stream, but I’d like to do it twice a week just before lunch time on the East Coast.  We’ll see how it goes, and I plan to make videos of every broadcast available for download and perhaps even as a podcast.  I’ll measure whether to do that based on interest.

Update: I have started exporting broadcasts to YouTube, and have corrected the link to today’s stream so that it connects to the YouTube video.  Twitch doesn’t keep past broadcasts around for long, and YouTube keeps videos permanently.

Everyone has access to social media today, and everyone can write anything they want to literally anyone on social media, and the world can see what you’re talking about.  However, removing and changing this content after it has been published can be a real hassle, and it is already in the hands of other folks from the moment that you share your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn post, or YouTube video.  Typically, this isn’t a problem, but what about those topics that you’re passionate about and are a little controversial?  On a blog, you have a lot more control over what content appears and you can remove it more easily, but if Google, Archive.org, or another archiving service indexes your blog you won’t be able to remove content from those services cache easily. Continue reading →

I was working on some code with a Docker Windows container today and ran into this error message:

ERROR: client version 1.22 is too old. Minimum supported API version is 1.24, please upgrade your client to a newer version

What the heck is that?  When I go to the command-line and check the docker version, I get the following output:

My currently installed Docker version

I have the current beta track version of the Docker tools installed in my Windows 10 machine so that I can run a Windows container, so what gives?  Clearly 1.25 is more recent than 1.22

Here’s the catch:  the docker-compose file format has been versioned and we need to increment the version requested in our docker-compose.yml file.  In any docker-compose file that you are using with the 1.24 or later version of the Docker client, you should request version “2.1”

My docker-compose.yml file now looks like:

Big thanks to the folks on this Github issue for a pointer to the fix.

I’ve been spending some time this holiday season writing and setting programs for light displays.  Like many homes around my neighborhood, we’ve installed lights outside to make the house appear festive.  My daughters and I decided to go a little further and picked up a package at the local Home Depot called AppLights for the house this year.  Little did I know this would be the start of a holiday light programming marathon that also included Jewelbots.  More on that in a bit… Continue reading →