Software Development

This article describes how to set up authenticated access to a (private or public) GitHub repository from Linux. Create & Set Up an SSH Key SSH Key Creation Create a new SSH key:

This guide shows how to get started with Home Assistant integration development. The article covers how to set up a development environment with WSL, VS Code, and devcontainers. An integration template is used to get you up and running quickly.

DevOps CI/CD pipelines on platforms such as GitHub or Azure DevOps are basically shell scripts that run in the cloud and are triggered by events, e.g., a Git push. This article explains common mistakes with pipeline scripts and how to avoid them.

This is a collection of things I found helpful for JavaScript development in Visual Studio Code, specifically the easy availability of TypeScript’s advanced type checking and error reporting functionality. Please note that this post is about lightweight JavaScript without any frameworks.

You may find yourself in a situation where you need to limit a set of credentials to a single Git repository only - like I did when I was working on a Git-based configuration backup solution for Linux. In such a case, you want the Git credentials you are storing per machine to grant access to that machine’s repository only. As useful as such a setup is from a security point of view, it is currently difficult to implement in Azure DevOps.

Linux famously stores all of its settings in files, making it easy to inspect, query, or backup the configuration with a plethora of tools, including Git. However, given that Git was conceived by the Linux community, there is surprisingly little integration. As a developer, I am used to managing everything with Git. Depending on my current degree of paranoia, I may put nearly or literally everything into version control. So where’s Git for Linux config files?

Building larger solutions in Visual Studio can be tediously slow. Part of the reason is that the compiler does not make use of multiple CPU cores well. This article shows you how to change that.

If you work with text, you need version control. That rule applies regardless of whether you write code or poetry (some might argue that those two are the same, anyway). Ignoring the CVS and SVN dinosaurs two distributed version control systems are being regarded as state of the art: Git and Mercurial. Functionality-wise they are nearly identical, but it seems that Git, with its open-source background, is poised to take over the enterprise, too, where Mercurial used to be strongest.

Creating an installer that does not suck is hard. The tools available are expensive, inadequate, overly complicated and/or poorly documented (pick any combination). WiX is one of the better choices. It is free and it is used for some Microsoft products. But WiX is just a wrapper around MSI and as such is unnecessarily difficult to use. In an effort to make life better for fellow developers I am publishing the full source code of uberAgent’s installer here.

The good news first: You can get a Verisign Authenticode code signing certificate for $99. Just check out https://sysdev.microsoft.com/ for details. This price even applies to the renewal when the original certificate expires after a year.

Today I was looking for the source of frequent delays when setting permissions from my new application SetACL Studio. I sprinkled the code with timestamped debug statements like these… System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(DateTime.Now + " - 1"); // Do something System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(DateTime.Now + " - 2"); …and found that the delays always had a duration of seven seconds. Wait - “inexplicable” delays of constant length - that smells of timeouts!

There are two equivalent ways trustees can be assigned a specific set of permissions on Windows: via generic rights and via a combination of standard and specific rights. Generic rights are identical for all object types. There are only four of them:

When dealing with Windows NTFS file system permissions, one quickly encounters the SYNCHRONIZE access right, the purpose of which may not be obvious. SYNCHRONIZE belongs to the standard access rights, just like DELETE, READ_CONTROL, WRITE_DAC and WRITE_OWNER.

Generally I am not the type to recommend re-implementing functionality present in some API. But with the Windows function CopyFile(Ex) there may be no alternative, because of the less than sub-optimal way Windows copies EFS-encrypted files:

Finding good information on how to enable drag and drop for MFC applications is hard enough (why?). But just when you think you should have it working, you hit a very solid wall: UIPI (User Interface Privilege Isolation, a variant of UAC, User Account Control). Because of “security” reasons, UIPI disables drag and drop from medium integrity processes (Explorer) to high integrity (aka elevated) processes by filtering out most window messages, including those required for drag and drop. In essence drag and drop from Explorer to your elevated application does not work.

If you create a C++ project in Visual Studio and configure it to “Use MFC in a Shared DLL” (the default) you need to make sure the C runtime (CRT) and the MFC libraries are installed in the correct versions on the end user’s computer. That can be difficult.

Let’s assume you have a C# project in Visual Studio. In that project, you reference an assembly (DLL) created by another of your projects. Because both projects are in active development, the version number of the referenced assembly changes frequently.

If you get weird errors in Visual Studio that basically state files like Windows.h cannot be found, the reason may be a missing or incorrect WindowsSdkDir variable. In my case, working with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (32 bit) on Windows 7 x64 (64 bit) everything was fine until I installed the Windows 7 SDK. After that, no SDK files could be found any more and nothing would compile. Uninstalling the SDK (which I did not really need anyway - I had installed it only to get at XPerf) did not help. After some research, I found out that the Visual Studio internal variable WindowsSdkDir (which is not an environment variable) was missing from the registry. After adding the following, everything worked like a charm again:

I just found out the following, which does not seem to be documented anywhere: The Windows API has a function for displaying a dialog that lets the user select a specific performance counter from all counters available on the local or a remote computer. The dialog is used by perfmon.exe, for example, and looks like this:

This is a quick and dirty description of how to use radio buttons in MFC, written because I could not find this information in a single place on the web.