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. The kind of project files we were using before that 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.

On the "Dotfuscator" tool by PreEmptive Solutions

I am giving this tool a try at work, and I am encountering a great many problems with it. I decided to publicly document my findings.

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.

[SOLVED] Maven deploy fails with status 422 unprocessable entity

It has been more than a year since I created this question on GitHub Community; a couple of days after that I found the solution by myself, so I answered my own question, and to this date comments keep being added by people who were helped by my post.  

When I look at it today, I notice that my answer has this particular style, this grumpy indignation which has become so characteristic of me, after a lifetime of battling with lame software, and even worse, with lame error messages. 

I thought I should share this on my blog for posterity.

Here is the link:

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:

Program Code is Uncountable

There are some words in English that are uncountable. For example: "fish", "sheep", "bread", etc. When we want to speak of many of those things, we do not say "fishes", "sheeps", or "breads"; we still use the singular form: "I caught lots of fish", "Please count the sheep", "Do not eat too much bread", etc.

Hyrum's Law

With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.

Hyrum's Law

(From https://www.hyrumslaw.com/)

Notable severely down-voted answers of mine on Stack Exchange

Among the answers that I have given to thousands of different questions on stackoverflow.com and softwareengineering.stackexchange.com, some have been vehemently down-voted.

Sometimes I make mistakes; when that is the case, I delete my answer; however, in other cases, the down-votes represent opinon which is in disagreement with my opinion, and in those cases I let my down-voted answers be, since I stand by my own convictions.

I suppose that this is the price you has to pay for: a) having your own opinions; and b) daring to voice them: there will always be some folks who will take offense.

Here is a list of my severely down-voted answers, so that you too can take offense and down-vote them even further:

Stack Overflow: api design - Which HTTP code is most suitable for when an endpoint is "full"?

Software Engineering: api design - Should a REST API return a 500 Internal Server Error to indicate that a query references an object that does not exist?

Software Engineering: grammar - Does it make sense to use "ys" instead of "ies" in identifiers to ease find-and-replace functionality?

Software Engineering: java - Is it okay to have objects that cast themselves, even if it pollutes the API of their subclasses?

Trees of Eterninty

This band has been haunting me for the past days. I feel compelled to write about it. This post will be completely different from the kind of posts you normally see on this blog; if you are here to read my usual technical stuff, you can skip this one.

[SOLVED] Windows: Sound becomes distorted after 1 second of playback

So today I started encountering a very weird audio issue: When I play music, it sounds normal in the beginning, but then after about a second the sound gets distorted, as if it is muffled, or as if it is undergoing severe lossy compression.  If I stop and resume the music, it goes through the same.

Normally I would know what to do in this situation, but as the years pass Microsoft keeps changing Windows, in the direction of making them dumber and dumber, so in Windows 10 I cannot find the old sound options dialog that I used to use to fix this problem.

Looking around the interwebz for a solution was not easy, so I decided to document the solution that I found.  If you are a power user, you can skim through the text and only look at the words in bold-italics.

1. Type Win+R and type mmsys.cpl. This will bring up the good old sound options, which Microsoft recently made inaccessible by any means other than this magical incantation, because obviously, nobody should ever want to fix any sound problems, because obviously, Windows has no sound problems.
2. In the Playback tab, locate your Speakers. If you are playing music at that moment, they are easy to locate from the live volume meter right next to them. 
3. Select Properties on your speakers.  (Not Configure, but Properties.)  This should open a Speakers Properties dialog.
4. On the Speaker Properties dialog, select the Advanced tab.
5. Near the bottom of the Advanced tab there is an Enable Fucked Up Sound checkbox, which is actually labelled Enable Enhancements.  (Euphemism has always been Microsoft's forte.)
6. Uncheck that checkbox; you are done.

Afterword

I probably started experiencing this problem right after pairing a new bluetooth sound device. Apparently when Windows detects a new sound device it sets some things up for it, and while doing that it entirely arbitrarily also goes and resets some settings for existing devices, e.g. it enables this "Enhancements" setting for my existing speakers.