Some time ago I moved this website from WordPress to Jekyll, but I never really explained the reasons. That’s why I want to discuss in today’s post the option of managing websites using an offline CMS or Static Site Generator. CMS like WordPress are often ridiculed and devalued by their complexity or their overall structure. In the meantime, there is a variety of similar content management systems available, but they usually share the core functionalities and structure. Usually, these systems consist of a backend, via which the website is managed. Articles are stored via a relational database. The websites can be adapted visually to one’s own preferences via templates and with the help of plug-ins a wide variety of additional functions can be implemented without major effort. ...

Today’s post is about learning new things more efficiently, i.e. wasting as little time as possible on learning. I use the Feynman technique, named after the physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman was known for his ability to break down complex facts into their core message and to convey them very easily. You certainly know the concept of being able to explain things to others in order to better understand them yourself. That’s exactly what I’m doing with my blog and that’s also the goal of the Feynman technique. Feynman’s focus is on not tricking yourself, after all, you don’t fool anyone as easily as you do yourself, but to really dig into a topic. ...

The Raspberry Pi is one of my favorite toys when it comes to hosting local applications or services like relational databases for testing purposes. At the moment I am trying to test an ASP.NET core application with this setup. However, getting .NET Core to run on the Raspberry Pi is not as easy as I thought, so I’d like to briefly outline the necessary steps. On GitHub you will find the download links we need. In my example I am using version 2.1.1. By following the link to the required version, you’ll see a table with different download links. ...

The partial keyword in C# allows you to spread a class definition across multiple files. You’ve probably seen this before when you created a WinForms application and viewed the MyForm.Designer.cs file, which contains the properties you define in the Designer. So the Visual Designer stores the entire definition of your user interface in this separate file. The class of your form itself is always marked partial. Files of partial methods must not be in different assemblies and will be merged during compilation. The IL code therefore looks exactly the same as if the class were a single file. ...

The team behind GitHub has created its own interesting open source projects in addition to the web platform. One of them is Electron, a cross-platform desktop solution used for the Atom editor. Microsoft also uses Electron for Visual Studio Code. Electron runs with NodeJS, so applications for it are usually written in JavaScript. For .NET developers there is now Electron.NET available, an Electron wrapper for ASP.NET Core applications. An Electron.NET application hosts the ASP.NET Core project. Electron.NET then provides access to Electron via API. This enables platform-specific functionalities such as push notifications or clipboard access. And the best thing about it is that you don’t notice anything about the underlying JavaScript. ...