Being tired of running back and forth to my 3D-printer to change stl files and starting / stopping prints, I decided to give Octoprint a shot. Octoprint basically provides a webinterface for 3D-printers, which allows you to send tasks over your local network to the printer and to monitor the prints. The software also provides a plugin functionality, so you can create your custom addons if required. Note that you can use Octoprint for slicing, but in my case I will be starting of with only sending pre sliced stl files to print. ...

In this series, I go over the very basics of the C# programming language. In todays guide, I will focus on writing custom extension methods for existing, prebuilt classes. You can use extension methods to add custom functionality to classes that are built by others. In my very case, I’d like to extend the functionality of the String class to set its first letter to upper case. I already implemented this functionality in my sideproject CryptoFolio, be sure to check out my article on the topic! ...

Altough the topic “Collections” matches programming in general, I’ve decided to add it to my series on mastering the basics of C#. For this reason, you will find some content here that is generally applicable, but I will also discuss different language-specific elements. Collections support several different use cases, e. g. searching through a set for objects with certain properties, or iterating through multiple elements by predefined sorting specifications. In the first part of this article, I will cover the two basic types of collections in C#, lists and dictionaries. Then, I will go over the groups of collections you might know from Java: lists, sets and maps. I’d like to describe and compare their characteristics and then implement their functionality in C#. ...

Hello Internet! Today, we will try to develop and run .NET Core Apps on a Macbook running Arch Linux! Because what could go wrong! (Honestly, this went way better than I thought.) Installation Before we can start writing .NET Core applications on Linux, we need to install some packages. The Arch Wiki states that to run .NET Core applications, the dotnet-runtime package needs to be installed. Additionally, we will need dotnet-sdk-2.0 from the AUR to be able to develop custom applications. ...

Comments are used in a lot of programming languages. While this concept is useful for a lot of purposes, beginners often start bad habits when commenting their code. In this article I will explain when comments are useful and on the other hand illustrate problems where commenting can be less meaningful or even disturbing. Bad Comments … At first sight (especially at the beginning of your programming career), you might think of comments as the perfect way to describe elements of your code that you don’t fully understand. This approach is not entirely wrong, but it does have a few problems that I will now discuss. ...