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apologies, this post is about an Italian open source release, so it’s going to be in Italian Spesometro.NET è un nuovo progetto open source che ho rilasciato con la mia azienda. Si tratta di un package .NET che permette di leggere, scrivere e convalidare lo Spesometro o, come è chiamato formalmente, la Comunicazione delle Fatture Emesse e Ricevute. Si tratta di un adempimento che in tempi recenti, per ragioni che non è il caso di affrontare in questo articolo, ha causato grosse difficoltà sia ai fornitori di soluzioni software che, e soprattutto, agli utenti finali di dette soluzioni. ...

Visual Studio 2017 just received an update (version 15.2). Among other nice things, this update brings full support for Python back into the official release of VS2017. As you might recall (see my old whiny post), previously Python was only available with Visual Studio 2017 Preview (a separate install). I just upgraded my copy of Visual Studio, added the Python Development Workload to it via the VS Installer, and finally (and very happily) uninstalled the whole Visual Studio Preview thingie. Alleluja! ...

I have been upgrading a few projects from their original PCL profiles (now deemed obsolete) to the Net Standard platform specification. It turned out to be a relatively straightforward process, but it does have its small hurdles, especially so if in the meantime you also want to transition to the new, streamlined, .csproj format as the migration will leave you with a now obsolete project.json project. In this article, I will cover upgrading a project from Portable Class Library to NetStandard. In a follow-up post, I plan to write about the switch from project.json to the new .csproj format. ...

Last February I published The State of Eve REST Framework. Among other things in that post, I mentioned that I was looking for ways that would allow me to allocate more time to the project (and its satellites). I really feel like I should put more effort into Eve, Cerberus and satellite projects Eve-Swagger, Flask-Sentinel, Eve.NET, etc. I love working on these projects and I know a lot of people rely on them. Also, I have big ideas that I would like to play with. At this point in time however, I cannot afford allocating more time to not-paying-the-bill activities. ...

So yesterday Visual Studio 2017 was released. Big news. Lots of cool stuff. As I write this I am watching the live stream of the 2 days-long launch event. If you want to learn about Python support in VS2017 though, you have to dig deeper and head over to the Python Engineering blog at Microsoft. As expected, the official release is actually coming out with no support for Python. It will come in a few months. Bummer. In the meanwhile however you can go and grab the (also newly released) Visual Studio Preview. This new kid on the block has the ability to be installed and used side-by-side with the official release and will be used - you guessed it - as an early preview of what’s coming next for Visual Studio. ...

So yesterday I pushed some code over to GitHub, then went off to work on a different project. A few seconds later I got an email from AppVeyor telling me that my CI build worker was reporting a failure. I was surprised as just ahead of the push I had tests all green in local. Turned out failure was on an equality assertion between two date values: As you can see the mismatch was precisely two hours. That always rings a Time Zone alarm bell in my head. I was under the assumption that since my time zone was correctly set in my account settings, the workers would pick it up. Well as it turns out, that is not the case as that setting is only used for notifications and NuGet feeds. The AppVeyor app worker runs on UTC by default. ...

So how do you install the awesome Python Development Tools on the latest Visual Studio 2017 RC? That might seem a stupid question considering that the Data Science and Python Development workload has been available with every Release Candidate so far. You simply select the workload during the installation and you’re done, right? Not quite. I found out the hard way this morning as I wanted to install VS 2017 RC3 on my development machine and, to my surprise, I could not find Python Development anywhere on the workloads window (which itself is a huge improvement over the VS 2015 install experience, by the way). Easy, I thought, they moved it to some secondary “optional workloads” tab, but a quick scan did not reveal any of that. ...

A new major release of the Eve REST API Framework is finally out with a number of cool new features (MongoDB Aggregations!), few fixes, and a couple of minor breaking changes. On the Eve blog you can find a detailed article about this important release. I am glad to report that the Eve-SQLAlchemy community extension, which allows SQL databases to serve as Eve backends, has seen a surge of activity around it. There is a new maintainer, Dominik Kellner, and a bunch of active contributors. Work is being done to align the extension with latest Eve release. If interested, please join the efforts there. Speaking of community extensions, only a few days ago Eve-Elastic version 2 has been released too. ...

Recently I had to build and deploy a private NuGet server. The official documentation is quite good, but I did hit some (admittedly small) hitches along the way, so I thought I might as well share the whole process. Hopefully this post will be helpful to the next guy or gal adventuring down the same path. If I don’t need to convince you on the usefulness and importance of packages in modern software development, then you can safely jump to The case for private NuGet feeds, and spare yourself some of my ramblings. ...

After a one year long development cycle I am proud to announce that version 1.0 of Cerberus, the data validation and transformation tool for Python, is finally out. A while ago I wrote an article on the new features and breaking changes that come with it, so please check it out carefully along with the changelog. I just wish to reiterate my gratitude towards all the contributors to the project. The ones who specifically worked on this awesome release, those who made it all possible, are: Matthew Ellison, Dominik Kellner, David Kirkendall, Damián Nohales, calve, Jonathan Huot, Roman Redkovich and of course the one and the only Frank Sachsenheim, whose role was pivotal to this release. ...