Code Magazine: Learn Python with Visual Studio

On the July/August issue of Code Magazine, available both printed and online, you can find my article Learn Python with Visual Studio. From the incipit: In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for 2018, Python sits comfortably in the first place as the most wanted programming language, with JavaScript and Go coming second and third. Python also ranks third in the “most loved” category. Despite the age (20 years and counting), Python’s popularity keeps growing, and for good reasons. It’s reliable, flexible, easy to learn, open-source, and cross-platform since the beginning. It also helps that, over time, it enjoys a robust and active developer community and incredibly rich eco-system of free libraries supporting all kind of usages: Web applications and services, desktop apps, scientific computing, scripting—you name it. ...

July 6, 2018

Eve 0.8 has been released

I am pleased to announce that the latest version of Eve, v0.8, has been released. As always, this release has been carefully crafted with love and passion by yours truly, with the help of a fantastic bunch of contributors. Highlights include data-validation-on-steroids thanks to the full support for Cerberus 1.x, also recently released, partial media requests (think media streaming), new hooks which allow you to attach custom callbacks to aggregation and soft deletion events, some new query operators, support for the mongo decimal type, and more. There are also many critical fixes and improvements. ...

May 10, 2018

Mac Notification Center does not work: the Quick Fix

I had this happen to me a few times already. Notification Center on the Mac goes completely numb: no more notifications and the list is empty. I’m writing down the fix, so I do not have to google the forums once again the next time. Open the Terminal, then: # this usually fails, as the notification server is already running launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist # kills and restarts the notification center - fixed!. killall NotificationCenter Join the newsletter to get an email alert when a new post surfaces on this site. If you want to get in touch, I am @nicolaiarocci on twitter. ...

April 12, 2018

Announcing my first online course

I am super excited to announce the launch of Eve: Building RESTful APIs with MongoDB and Flask, a brand new TalkPython Training course. Authoring this course has been a new experience for me, and I must say that I very much enjoyed every minute of it. Finding myself in the exciting position being at the same time both the project author and the instructor, I did my best to focus on the typical issues I know from experience most people face when they start setting up their first RESTful web service with Flask and Eve. ...

March 15, 2018

Quick fix: MongoDB fails when saving Decimal fields

So today I was trying to store some decimal fields on a MongoDB 3.4 instance and I kept failing, miserably. In Compass I was getting a somewhat obscure “connection lost” message on every save attempt. Upgrading to Mongo 3.4.10 (I was on 3.4.4) improved things, as the error message was now hinting at the setFeatureCompatibilityVersion setting which, apparently, was preventing some features to be made available. Now that made sense, as this specific database had been upgraded all the way from up Mongo 2.6. A quick lookup revealed that, when upgrading to 3.4, setFeatureCompatibilityVersion is automatically set to "3.2". As we all know, support for Decimal type only comes with Mongo 3.4. ...

November 23, 2017

Spesometro Open Source per .NET

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. ...

October 5, 2017

Python Workload now officially supported in Visual Studio 2017

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! ...

May 11, 2017

How to convert a PCL (Portable) project to NetStandard

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. ...

May 10, 2017

Eve and Cerberus funding campaign

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. ...

April 27, 2017

Python support in Visual Studio 2017 or the lack thereof

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. ...

March 8, 2017