Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.

• How to use Grok 4 without SuperGrok subscription

  Posted on July 11, 2025

  Grok 4 was just announced and it looks incredible. So you want to try it out, but are hesitant to shell out $300/year for the subscription just to try it out. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • ai

• Consuming VSIX metadata from C#

  Posted on November 8, 2024

  Sometimes it’s useful to render VSIX manifest metadata in logs, or some UI in your extension. You could just duplicate the values in your code, but that’s error-prone and tedious. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • vsx
  • visualstudio

• Typed chat completions with OpenAI and .NET 9

  Posted on October 9, 2024

  How to combine OpenAI structured outputs with .NET 9 ability to export JSON schemas to provide a strong-typed API for chat completions. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • dotnet
  • openai
  • ai

• Showcase your NuGet package stats with fancy badges

  Posted on October 9, 2024

  NuGet.org doesn't provide much in the way of useful stats you can embed easily in your sites (blog, project readmes, etc.). Shields.io badges combined with static JSON scraped regularly from nuget.org can help. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • dotnet
  • openai
  • ai

• SponsorLink v2: A New Hope

  Posted on October 8, 2024

  After collecting feedback from last year's attempt, reflecting on many very valid points, I went back to the drawing board on SponsorLink and I'm ready to start rolling out v2. Read on to learn about what's new and entirely rewritten ;-). [Read More]

  Tags:

  • oss
  • github
  • sponsors
  • dotnet

• Condition xunit tests to presence of user secrets

  Posted on October 7, 2024

  Sometimes you need some API keys, connection strings and the like in order to run your tests. If you’re using user secrets, which is highly recommended, you can share your secrets with your tests quite easily by moving the UserSecretsId MSBuild property to a Directory.Build.props. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • dotnet
  • test
  • xunit

• Deploying dotnet-isolated function app from CLI

  Posted on August 17, 2024

  Whether you’re creating a brand-new .NET isolated function app or migrating an existing one, if you’re deploying it using the Azure Functions Core Tools, you might encounter this error: [Read More]

  Tags:

  • dotnet
  • azure
  • cli

• Beautiful dotnet test summary reports

  Posted on August 17, 2024

  Running tests across multiple projects in a solution doesn’t have to look like the 90s in today’s console. Now you can use a simple dotnet global tool to get an intuitive glimpse at what happened with that last test run that resulted in gazillion lines of text :) [Read More]

  Tags:

  • dotnet
  • test
  • cli

• How to run dotnet tests with automatic smart retry

  Posted on August 17, 2024

  When running dotnet test, there is no built-in mechanism to retry failed tests, and constructing the filter format for re-running them is non-trivial. This post showcases a new dotnet global tool dotnet-retest that fixes this. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • dotnet
  • test
  • cli

• Auto-document dotnet CLI tool via dynamically generated markdown readme fragments

  Posted on July 16, 2024

  Every time I create a new CLI tool, I face the challenge of keeping the project and package readme (for dotnet tools like dotnet-trx) up to date with the evolving tool itself. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • tool
  • dotnet
  • markdown
  • github

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