Posts

Enabling Powerlines in your Visual Studio Terminal

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I've been a fan of Windows Terminal since day one and have configured my terminal to include git information as well as the clock.  This is well document by many people including Scott Hanselman .  Over the last 2 weeks I've started playing with using Terminal within Visual Studio that is itself powered by Windows Terminal, you can tell I've used Visual Studio Code a lot recently and I like the integrated terminal, its convenient to have it open in the repo's directory, especially handy for testing build scripts. However, the default experience (for me at least) wasn't a great. I had setup my Visual Studio terminal as the following: Developer PowerShell, Developer Command Prompt (although I never use this and should probably kill it!) and then my 2 Ubuntu environments. Great, my terminal dropdown in VS lists everything nicely:  However.... It's imported my environment settings (which is great) but the default font is missing powerlines so everything is borke

Exploring Ubuntu Desktop on the Raspberry PI

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With the release of Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 being available for the Raspberry PI this week I thought I'd take it out for a spin on one of the Raspberry PI 4's I have lying around. Now, officially you need to use a 4GB or 8GB device, however both of my spare ones only have 2GB so thought I'd try anyway and if things go well look at treating myself to a new shiny 8GB one. Note: most of this post was written on the 25th however after a mishap (I knocked the PI off my desk and broke the SD Card slot 😒I had to wait until the 31st to complete the .NET 5 test instead running the PI 4 via an old USB SSD) Initial Install First off Installing Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 is nice and easy, you can get the image and apply it to an SD Card or for a nice step through wizard the Raspberry PI installer is the way to go. It's a nice four step process, choose Ubuntu and then 20.10 Ubuntu Desktop, choose the destination device and click write. It takes a while to write and verify but once complete

Experiments with WSL2... Yes you can use VSCode but could you run...

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I'm a massive fan of WSL and now WSL2 is finally here (I've been using it during preview since day 1 but my work machine sadly couldn't run it until now...). With the Docker Desktop integration and some awesome I/O and performance metrics it really is good. This great article by Phoronix really shows how near native it is . I often checkout some of my newer work code out in Ubuntu and then use VSCode for doing my work where appropriate however C# in VSCode is OK but it's not *great* VS2019 is still a better experience on the whole. About 2 months ago I tried JetBrains Rider 2020 out and although I liked it I couldn't quite justify using it on Windows instead of VS2019 which my work MSDN provides, however tonight I had a thought... Rider is cross platform, windows, macos and linux... could I get Rider running via WSL2 would it be awesome or horrible.... Let's find out.... 22:00 Time to Start! First I go to JetBrains website and go grab the download link f