Category Archives: Programming

Calling All COBOL Programmers

Posted on April 8, 2020 by Robert Barron

My first paying job out of college in the early 1990’s was working for a company that made COBOL compilers and runtimes. Even then the language was something of a relic and there were frequent predictions about its eventual demise. … Continue reading →

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Basic Azure SQL Performance

Posted on January 18, 2020 by Robert Barron

In order to consolidate some websites onto one platform I had plans to move my outdoor sites to Azure. None of my sites are particularly large in terms of load so I figured a B1 app instance and a Basic … Continue reading →

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Goodbye Google+

Posted on August 3, 2019 by Robert Barron

Well, it’s been on its way out for some time, but I finally got around to removing the share on Google+ button from my outdoor sites (Texas Hiking, Austin Explorer and Hiking Trailhead). It seems like it was only yesterday … Continue reading →

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Index Attribute in ASP.Net Core

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Robert Barron

I was attempting to add an [Index] attribute to a field on a project I started recently that’s using ASP.Net Core 2.2. Though the number of records in the table for now is not terribly large I was just planning … Continue reading →

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Updating PyCharm and JRE

Posted on July 27, 2017 by Robert Barron

When updating your Python IDE PyCharm to the latest version you might run into an issue on older machines.  It looks like PyCharm will helpfully install a 64-bit JRE, but not a 32-bit version, even if you opt to include … Continue reading →

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Locking files for testing

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Robert Barron

Getting errors when trying to access locked files is a common situation that must be addressed by programs.  On Windows machines it’s fairly easy to replicate the scenario of a locked file using a simple technique that I picked up … Continue reading →

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HTML escape characters in Azure app settings

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Robert Barron

Windows applications can make use of XML nodes in appSettings to pass configuration information into a program.  Because the app.config (or web.config) file is XML some characters need to be escaped so that they are not improperly parsed as part … Continue reading →

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Blank lines in Jinja2 Templates

Posted on November 13, 2014 by Robert Barron

When working with the Jinja2 templating engine on Python I’ve been bugged by blank lines that got inserted into the resultant XML when an optional node was excluded from the output.  Though Jinja2 sports some support for controlling whitespace I … Continue reading →

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DateTime Intervals Versus DateTimes

Posted on July 15, 2014 by Robert Barron

I had wondered why some websites displayed date intervals (i.e. “5 days ago”, “4 hours ago”) for user posts instead of printing actual dates and times. Doing some new website work recently caused a revelation about that choice and how … Continue reading →

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Code First Foreign Keys With Different Names

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Robert Barron

The Entity Framework’s Code First scheme is handy way to do quick development of new websites. I recently had an issue with a foreign key relationship between a table I created and the ASP.Net Identity user table AspNetUsers. Typically, EF … Continue reading →

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