Software

In late May 2026, I migrated this blog from Hugo’s Cayman theme to PaperMod. The migration gave the site a cleaner layout and a better foundation for features such as search, archives, and tags. This post captures the small, repeatable workflow I use to create content, preview it locally, and publish it. Create and preview a post Change directory to your local blog’s Git repository root. Hugo is self-contained on Windows. Once the folder containing hugo.exe has been added to your Windows PATH, you can run the site directly from its Git repository. ...

At the recent dotNetConf 2021, amongst all the other goodies released and presented ( .NET 6 ; VS2022 ), there was a session covering Testing tools for .NET. One in particular caught my eye. Playwright This one merits further investigation. Testing Tools for .NET and cross-platform apps https://playwright.dev/dotnet/

After recently migrating an application from on-premises to Azure, I have been keeping a close eye on its performance. The application uses Azure SQL. The Azure portal puts forth recommendations to tune the database e.g. create new indices or drop duplicates. That works well. However I found another SQL query, which provides more recommendations This site ‘Tune your database’ Tune applications and databases for performance in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance provided some useful guidance. ...

Previously I had tried to install oh-my-posh prompts and folder icons. It never quite worked for me and I kept trying to fix it on and off. When Scott Hanselman posted about it (again) in Aug, I had to have a look. However even this time around, I did not get it 100% correct. Could be my profile file was corrupted. I did try a few things ( uninstalling the fonts, recreating my profile ), however things did not improve. ...

Finally got around to using Playwright - a tool for UI testing. The official documentation is here https://playwright.dev/ . I am using C# and Microsoft has a nuget package. I also wanted to use it in a NUnit project. The two sites that helped me get started were : Testing Web Applications with PlayWright and C# End-To-End Testing With Playwright Sharp Create a new NUnit project in VS2019 (make sure you use .NET 5 and above). Add the Playwright NuGet package. ...

This blog richardborges.net, has been running on GitHub (and Jekyll) since July 2018. As the number of posts increased, I felt the need for a search feature. Elasticsearch is one of my favourite tools, but that would be an overkill for this static site. I wanted something small and easy. I have been following Jeremy Likness for a while and was quite impressed by his journey, migrating from “Medium” to “Hugo”. In particular Dynamic Search in a Static Hugo Website - Jeremy Likness. ...

I was working on a Web App which uses a SQL database and EntityFramework. The app is hosted in Azure. I spent some time fixing up the csproj file so that the build and release pipelines work correctly i.e. once the code is committed to the repository, a build is kicked off and deployment takes place. So far so good. However on visiting the site I see this error: Error : The underlying provider failed on Open. Stack Trace : at System.Data.Entity.Core.EntityClient.EntityConnection.Open() at System.Data.Entity.Core.Objects.ObjectContext.EnsureConnection(Boolean shouldMonitorTransactions) ...

These are my notes on upgrading elasticseach from v5.3 to v6.4.2. This was done on Windows Server 2016 with 32GB RAM and 500GB hdd. The source data was about 300GB in size. Steps Download elasticsearch + kibana from downloads. After extracting to my local drive, I used NSSM to run these as windows services. You should now be able to visit http://localhost:9200 (elasticsearch) and http://localhost:5601 ( kibana ) Copy across the 5.3 data using robcopy. Install elasticsearch 5.3 ( update elasticsearch.yml ) to run 5.3 at http://localhost:8200 ( as 6.4.2 is running on port 9200) Create the new indices on 6.4.2 Migrate the data from 5.3 to 6.4.2 using reindex Additional resources Upgrade Elasticsearch

Attended NDC sydney and quite enjoyed it. This is a 3 day conference held at the Hilton in Sydney CBD. They even organise a childrens coding camp before the start of the conference. Thats a nice touch. Attended quite a few talks over the 3 days. The sessions The ones that stand out for me were ASP.Net Core 2.1 - the out of the box benefits Using Async-Await correctly in C# Team culture ( e.g. no blame retrospectives ) React + GraphQL + Docker

To come to grips with react, I completing a few courses on react at PluralSight, which helped me get a better understanding of react. I also found the facebook maintained react page worth a visit. Create React App Visit Create React App which contains step by step instructions. Additional resources I was trying to add a react component to an ASP.Net MVC page. This page The Minimal React + Webpack 4 + Babel Setup proved very helpful.