I’ve used Cmder for my Windows command line work for a while now, however, the arrival of Windows Terminal has made me take another look at this.

I’m terrible at updating the various applications, frameworks and packages that are installed on my development machines. As such I was pretty excited to discover the Winget application which acts as an npm style package manager for my Windows machine - once installed, run the following to get a list of the applications that have updates available for them:

Scenario - Building a project that has packages in an Azure private feed ‘just works’ in Visual Studio but VSCode receives a Response status code does not indicate success: 401 (Unauthorized) error.

TLDR

The ‘Basic’ option in the SQL Express installer doesn’t install LocalDB, you need to switch to ‘Download Media’ and select it as the option there.

Scenario - An existing data type has changed, from string to int for example, and therefore may contain invalid data. Entity Framework migrations will producing the following error:

Scenario - You’re trying to build and/or run a Visual Studio type project and it complains about being unable to access a custom (and for this case unnecessary) NuGet feed, something like:

Having scratched my head for a while wondering why my Python 3.7 install was taking precedence over my Python 3.8 one, despite being convinced that 3.8 was taking priority on the PATH, I stumbled across this SO answer containing the following key line:

The following notes are a subset of the information provided in this tutorial.

Getting a compatible image to boot as a ‘Generation 2’ VM is not all that obvious. This article gives a good explanation. The critical bit:

Update April 2021

While working with C# I have regularly typed in string. and then been presented with two options:

I recently had cause to do some work with Docker and inevitably ended up spending a lot of time at a command prompt. Depending on where I am and what I’m trying to achieve I might fire up I might launch the Windows Command Prompt, PowerShell or even Git Bash and often combinations of them all to help distinguish the task form each other. Sure it works but these days I figured there must be a better way. Then I stumbled across cmder. What is Cmder?

I’m fairly sure that if I did a survey of the features I use, or indeed am even aware of, for pretty much any piece of them I probably wouldn’t even hit 50%. I tend to fall in to a way of working with each that means I can get what I need by doing the same thing each time. This gets the job done but limits the scope for discovering new and potentially time saving methods.

I really like the concept behind OKRs. The idea that the business has something it wants to achieve and should have a way to measure it’s progress towards that, well, it just makes sense.