The Ju52 cocktail

How to make the Ju52 cocktail:

In a tall glass with no ice, mix the following:

2 parts coffee liqueur (e.g. Kahlúa (W))

2 parts cream liqueur (e.g. Baileys Irish Cream (W))

1 part orange liqueur (e g. Grand Marnier (W))

4 parts cold milk.

The special guy that I am, I had to go invent my own cocktail. As its name betrays, it is similar to B52 (W). In fact, the Ju52 is just B52 with cold milk instead of ice.

 

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The benefits

The replacement of ice with cold milk imparts the following benefits to the drink:

How to organize a Visual Studio Solution

Visual Studio is a capricious product, and its "Solution" subsystem is especially capricious. When you look at what options are available you might think you have a great degree of freedom to structure things the way you want, but as you will inevitably (and painfully) find out later, many things have to be done in precisely one, entirely undocumented way, or else there will be pain of the worst kind: Visual Studio will malfunction either without any error message, or with error messages that are completely unhelpful for locating and fixing the problem.

Here is a list of things I have (painfully) found out over the years.

Simplification of triple-choice prompts to dual-choice

I have a lot to say about the modern trend in graphical user interface design which aims to achieve an impossibly clean look at the expense of usability, but this is going to be the subject of another blog post. In this post, I want to talk about simplifying the user interface when the simplification is clearly a win, both from a usability point of view and, incidentally, from an aesthetics point of view. Specifically, I want to show how a yes/no/cancel prompt can be reduced to just a yes/cancel prompt.

Converting MSBuild project files from legacy-style to SDK-style

I recently did this at work, and I decided to document the process here in the form of a how-to guide. Please note that I am not an expert, I am learning as I go along, so there may be mistakes.

Sdk-style project files have existed since net5, but when they were introduced they were made compatible with earlier versions of dotnet, such as dotnet framework 4.7.2. The kind of project files we were using before can now be called legacy-style project files.

• Legacy-style project files begin with <Project ToolsVersion="...
• Sdk-style project files begin with <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">.

Sdk-style project files are necessary if you want to:

• Start using the `dotnet` command-line utility and all the functionality that it provides.
• Eventually migrate to a modern version of dotnet.

Migrating a project from DotNet Framework 4.7.2 to DotNet 7

I recently did this at work, and I decided to document the process here in the form of a how-to guide. Please note that I am not an expert, I am learning as I go along, so there may be mistakes.

The Trouble with XAML Hot Reload in WPF

The XAML Hot Reload feature of WPF is extremely useful because GUI work often involves tweaking visual aspects of an application, so being able to modify XAML, save it, and immediately see the changes on the screen saves a huge amount of time as opposed to having to terminate the application, modify the code, re-compile, re-run, and go clickety-clickety-click to navigate to the same page and finally see your changes.

Unfortunately, as a WPF project grows, the XAML Hot Reload feature inevitably one day stops working: You modify your XAML, you save the XAML file, and yet nothing changes on the screen. The message "No changes were found" appears in the Hot Reload tab of the Visual Studio Output Window, but it is a damned lie, because you just made changes. This can really be a problem.

When you find yourself in this extremely unpleasant situation, here is a list of things to try:

Mouse Wheel Natural Scrolling in Windows

Some time ago and for about a year I used a Mac, which had natural scrolling by default. I decided to resist the urge to immediately configure it to work like Windows, and instead I made it a point to give natural scrolling a try for at least a while before making up my mind as to whether to keep it or lose it. While giving it a try, I was surprised to see that it was very easy for me to adjust to it, despite the fact that I have been using the unnatural Windows scrolling mode for nearly 30 years. (Ever since the mouse wheel became a thing.) I found that natural scrolling was indeed... natural. So, I kept using it, and I became addicted to it. Ever since then, I always have to configure natural scrolling on any Windows machine that I get my hands on before I can start using that machine.

Artwork based on original mouse-15887 by Arkthus from the Noun Project

Windows is so poor that it does not offer any user interface through which a novice user can change the mouse wheel scrolling mode. To do that you have to edit the registry, and the setting you are going to be modifying is a machine setting, so you will be affecting the mouse wheel mode for all users, not just for yourself. This is unbelievably lame, but hey, that's Windows, we are totally used to lame.