Development

Since I’ve been working with the community on porting desktop applications from .NET Framework to .NET Core, I’ve noticed that there are two camps of folks: some want a very simple and short list of instructions to get their apps ported to .NET Core while others prefer a more principled approach with more background information. Instead of writing up a “Swiss Army knife”-document, we are going to publish two blog posts, one for each camp:

• This post is the simple case. It’s focused on simple instructions and smaller applications and is the easiest way to move your app to .NET Core.
• We will publish another post for more complicated cases. This post will focus more on non-trivial applications, such WPF application with dependencies on WCF and third-party UI packages.

If you prefer watching videos instead of reading, here is the video where I do everything that is described below.

Since its completion more than 675 years ago, the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame has captivated millions of people with its incomparable beauty. From its legendary stained glass rose window to its towering spire, it’s widely regarded as one of the most stunning examples of medieval architecture in history.

There is a story about an experience of using Actor Model in one interesting project of developing an automatic control system for a theatre. Below I'll tell my impressions, no more than that.

Some days ago we announced the preview of Windows Vision Skills, a set of NuGet packages that make it easy for application developers to solve complex computer vision problems using a simple set of APIs.

Figure 1- From left to right, you are seeing in action the Object Detector, Skeletal Detector, and Emotion Recognizer skills.

From idea to implementation: modifying the existing elliptic curve signature scheme to be deterministic and providing functions on it to obtain verifiable within the blockchain pseudorandom numbers.

The Time Travel Debugging (TTD) preview in Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 provides the ability to record a Web app running on a Azure Virtual Machine (VM) and then accurately reconstruct and replay the execution path. TTD integrates with our Snapshot Debugger offering and allows you to rewind and replay each line of code however many times you want, helping you isolate and identify problems that might only occur in production environments.

Google shut down their social media platform Google+ on April 2, 2019. It’s hard to find some technical article that hasn’t mentioned the end of Google’s social network era. But, a high level of consistency in connectivity within services of the company had received scant attention. In this article I would like to share my thoughts on the internal way of Google services consistency and what it means for Google API users when it comes to a Google+ shutdown.

In this post we'd like to share an interesting way of dealing with configuration of a distributed system.
The configuration is represented directly in Scala language in a type safe manner. An example implementation is described in details. Various aspects of the proposal are discussed, including influence on the overall development process.

(на русском)

Why do so many programmers hate UI work? Because it is tedious. Especially, for the Web, but other types of UI are only slightly easier. Layouts, margins, paddings — neverending stream of little tweaks to make it look OK on all sane environments, and somehow this freaking button sometimes overlaps that input field. Rrrr! And yes, it should not hang on button clicks, which means a lot of asynchronous programming, which is a nightmare.

And don’t even speak about aesthetics and usability! Choose right colours, element sizes and locations, find/draw images and put them where they fit, think about user workflows — isn’t it a designers’ or Ux specialists’ job?! Leave me alone, I’m a programmer. I work with backend layers, where everything is straightforward and linear, there are no buttloads of different environments to adjust to, and design is guided by mere logic without pesky fussing with ‘user friendliness’ and ’beauty’!

Everyone knows great documentation makes or breaks a tech product — but few realize how much work goes into it. At Postgres Professional, the docs are written with the same discipline as the code. What’s even more impressive, all of it is done by a team of just ten people. We talked to senior technical writer Ekaterina Gololobova to see how it really works — from the first task to the final commit.

One of the open challenges in the database world is keeping a database consistent across multiple DBMS instances (nodes) that independently handle client connections. The crux of the issue is ensuring that if one node fails, the others keep running smoothly — accepting connections, committing transactions, and maintaining consistency without a hitch. Think of it like a single DBMS instance staying operational despite a faulty RAM stick or intermittent access to multiple CPU cores.

My name is Andrey Lepikhov, and I’d like to kick off a discussion about the multi-master concept in PostgreSQL: its practical value, feasibility, and the tech stack needed to make it happen. By framing the problem more narrowly, we might find a solution that’s genuinely useful for the industry.

Traditional approaches to SQL query generation often rely on instruction-tuned language models, but these can be inefficient and inaccurate. In this article, we’ll explore a new method based on reinforcement learning for model fine-tuning, which can improve both the accuracy and efficiency of SQL generation.

The “test everything” principle doesn’t improve data quality — it destroys it. Hundreds of useless alerts create noise that drowns out truly important signals, and the team stops responding to them. Google and Monzo have already moved away from this approach.

Here’s how to shift from blanket testing to targeted checks at nodes with the greatest impact radius — and why one well-placed test at the source is worth more than a hundred checks downstream.

From outsourcing to product: a QA engineer’s honest journey to better releases, healthier work culture & real impact on the product.

n8n is a powerful, extendable workflow automation tool that allows you to connect different applications and services. Running it on your local machine gives you complete control over your data and workflows, which can be done on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. This tutorial covers the two primary methods for local installation: using Docker and using Node.js (npm). If you are interested, then read this article until the end. :)