ASP.NET 6 Migration Cheatsheet and FAQ

David Fowler has a very informative gist up on GitHub. It’s titled [Migration to ASP.NET Core. NET6][3] and it’s filled with details, recipes and FAQs on migrating an ASP.NET Core 5 web app to ASP.NET Core 61. The focus is on the new, streamlined hosting model, also known as Minimal APIs2. To be clear, You don’t have to move to the new model. As the FAQ section emphasizes: Do I have to migrate to the new hosting model...

September 23, 2021

Book Review: Nausea

Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of the novel, is a former adventurer who has been living for three years in Bouville, a fictional French seaport town, researching the life of an 18th-century diplomat. During his previous life around the world, Antoine has seen many places, met many interesting people, done exciting things. For the last three years, however, he’s been alone in Bouville. He has no friends and no desire to make some or meet anyone....

September 22, 2021

The American Style of quotation mark punctuation makes no sense

Years ago, I translated an essay by Terry Windling, On Tolkien and Fairie-Stories, from American English to Italian. I remember arguing with the author about her use of periods in quotations. Each quotation would end with a period before the closing mark. I was puzzled. We don’t do that in Italy. More importantly, I read many English texts where the period was left outside the quotation itself. She insisted that her style was correct1....

September 16, 2021

Daft Punk's legendary Alive 2007 concert with remastered audio and 4K video

Someone did it –the perfect Daft Punk tribute after their break up. Also ideal for those hard-coding sessions. For the first time in 14 years, experience Daft Punk like never before! The first professionally recorded live show; revived meticulously by remastering and restoring the audio and video. The Alive 2007 show is considered a staple in live performances featuring the signature ‘Pyramid’ and groundbreaking visuals, which is now complemented by a fully remastered audio track which aims to maximize the experience....

September 8, 2021

Hiking the Translagorai 25 years later

A couple of weeks ago I went hiking the Translagorai, an 80 km-long trail that traverses the whole Lagorai mountain range in the Alps. The route takes place in a mountain environment where the anthropic pressure is reduced, especially compared to the more famous nearby Dolomites destinations. There are very few managed huts, most of which do not offer overnight stays, and relatively few bivouacs (emergency huts, usually dislocated in the most isolated areas along the hike)....

September 6, 2021

Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks

Wendy Molyneux, writing unabashedly for McSweeney’s, summarizes all I have to say on the COVID vaccine and never dared to say: You think vaccines don’t fucking work? Oh, fuck off into the trash, you attention-seeking fuckworm-faced shitbutt. This isn’t even a point worth discussing, you fuck-o-rama fuck-stival of ignorance. Vaccines got rid of smallpox and polio and all the other disgusting diseases that used to kill off little fucks like you en masse....

September 4, 2021

Performance improvements in .NET6

I’m pretty psyched about the upcoming .NET6 release. I’ve already touched on ASP.NET 6 Minimal APIs. Continuing on the long-established tradition, the team has also worked hard on the performance side of things. File IO, for example, is seeing impressive gains: For .NET 6, we have made FileStream much faster and more reliable, thanks to an almost entire re-write. For same cases, the async implementation is now a few times faster!...

September 3, 2021

Book Review: Proud tobea Flyer

I happened across this book by pure chance. After having ice cream in our favourite place in Milano Marittima, my wife and I visited a small street market with all kinds of booths. Of course, there was a used book stand toward which I immediately gravitated. A quick scan revealed nothing of interest, so I moved along. But Serena, who arrived at the booth moments after I left, knew more. A simple, no-frills, cardboard-covered book which carried a giant PROUD 2BEA FLYER title on the spine caught her attention....

August 28, 2021

How to read Windows-1252 encoded files with .NETCore and .NET5+

Another day, another lesson learned: modern .NET does not support the Windows-1252 encoding out of the box. Today my colleague was happily porting a legacy NET4+ app to NET6. As usual, the port was super-easy; it would compile and run just fine, so he was surprised when the app crashed reading a few specific XML files. That’s when I was called in. A closer inspection revealed a pattern: all those crashing files were Windows 1252-encoded (the rest, a vast majority, were UTF-8....

August 27, 2021

How to restore a single Postgres database from a pg_dumpall dump

Today I learned how to restore a single Postgres database from a global dump generated with pg_dumpall. Now, pg_dumpall is handy when you want to back up an entire Postgres cluster. It will dump all databases and global objects in a single text file. In contrast, pg_dump, the go-to tool for Postgres backups, offers more control but only works with a single database and doesn’t dump global objects, such as the roles/users linked to the database....

August 25, 2021