Category: Blog

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Ctrl-Alt-Delete

This week will be my first week after officially terminating my previous job, even though I have been working for the new one for over a month. I had acquired a considerable amount of PTO hours, as I planned to wind down a bit, which allowed me to move into my new job earlier than expected.

I didn’t expect to move at all, but things get on your path you hadn’t imagined to be happening. If you asked me what 2024 would look like at the end of the year, I most likely wouldn’t have responded with an answer indicating I would be working for a company on the other side of the world.

I had a vacation scheduled in May, so I’m not entirely neglecting myself by starting a month before terminating the other. We returned from an impressive sea tour of the Mediterranean Sea and have been going through some updates that resulted from Microsoft’s Build 2024 Conference, which happened in the same week as my vacation, and, therefore, I was unable to attend.

This week will also be the week to celebrate my birthday, so everything feels like the big Ctrl-Alt-Delete … a milestone with the big reset of my life. Now, my fingers are crossed, and I hope the machine will return without moving into the Blue Screen.

With the vacation behind us and the old job terminated, we will start doing our livestreams again this week. If you have suggestions on what to look at first, let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Soft as in Software YouTube Channel

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Moving Day

foto by @crystalmariesing via Twenty20

I have been preparing this for some time now, but still in progress … I moved my personal blog from www.maartenvanstam.nl to the Soft as in Software blog.softasinsoftware.com. In fact, the old blog still exists but as you are reading this, new posts will only appear on this address: blog.softasinsoftware.com.

The purpose of this blog is that it will match my ‘new’ media where my blog will match my video streams on my Soft as in Software YouTube channel, and my Soft as in Software Twitch channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow the Twitch channel while you are at it 😉.

I have picked up Live Coding again on YouTube and Twitch where I currently focus on Office Add-in development and Blazor Web Assembly development.

With Office Add-in development the focus is on the OfficeDev PnP repo monitored by Microsoft. This repo needs some serious attention to get it up to a decent quality standard. Some samples are outdated, new samples are needed, so in short much to do there. If you are into that feel free to join me on that.

For Blazor Web Assembly the goal is to rebuild my Soft as in Software landing page. This will be my main source related to the Soft as in Software ‘brand’ if you like. Even this blog will be available from that site. So, if you forgot where to find my blog, simply go the Soft as in Software landing page where you can find the blog in one of the menu items.

With this quick post I re-open my blog and if you are into Office Development (this is a huge area so keep coming back for one or more Office Development updates) or .NET/Blazor minded this blog, my videos on YouTube or Live Stream on YouTube and Twitch might interest you as well.

I have so many plans with this, I am looking forward to a new fresh start and I like to make this interactive, so if you want to share your comments or work with me on the repos, just holler and we’ll see how we can get this going.

In my next blog I will get into some more details on what happened and get into my plans for all of this. Stay tuned!

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Happy 2020

It’s been a while, almost year, here … and whenever there is a new year, we pick up our resolutions from last year and see what we can do that we missed progressing the past year. Blogging is one of these things … so let’s pick this up again for now and see where it ends.

In my professional work I’ve been limited in doing things programmer-wise, more a people manager than coding manager at this time. Trying to get our foreign team up and running and at sometimes actually deliver some products. Doing so means I have almost no time at all to do programming.

For this reason, I decided to go on and do the Live Coding thing. Forcing me to go live in front of a camera and coding live on screen is pushing me to keep my coding skills on par. Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!

So join me in my Live Coding sessions on Twitch. You can find my channel here:

https://twitch.tv/MaartenVanStam

Hit the follow button if you are, like me, too lazy to look up the broadcast schedule so you get notified whenever I get online to do the Programming Thing.

At this time I’m working on two main topics:

· Office Development (Who would have guessed?) where I’m trying to do the same things that I was able to do using VSTO to build my Add-ins. Spoiler Alert: You can’t do everything you were able to do with VSTO, but you can do some cool shit anyway …

· Blazor Web Development, building web sites using C# and .NET Core … where Office moved away from .NET to Web Technologies .NET did exactly the other way around and is now focusing on Web Technologies!

Let me know what you think about all these new and not so recent technologies … will they save the world?

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Open Live Writer – Windows Live Writer Open Sourced!

openlivewriter-purpleheader

If you have been using Windows Live Writer to do your blogging you know it was a bit of a PITA to get this up and running on your current platform. Well, this now will change as Microsoft added this to their stack of Open Source software, to keep it alive and allow you to propose enhancements:

“Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the well–loved but not actively developed Windows Live Writer code. Open Live Writer is provided under a MIT license.”

If you read this it is the evidence that it works, as it is written using the download link to the Open Live Writer installer you can find here:

Download

Go to the Open Live Writer website and read all the details, or even better … fork it and start working on it!

http://openlivewriter.org/

Have Fun!