Easy Window Switcher, our Windows “power toy” that brings macOS-like switching between open windows of the same application with Alt+` to Microsoft Windows, has just been updated to version 1.3.0. This new release brings some much requested fixes for keyboard layouts used by our friends in Denmark and Sweden and some more compatibility fixes for everyone else.
NeoSmart Technologies is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the latest additions to its Easy Recovery Essentials™ for Windows line of bootable repair and recovery tools for Microsoft Windows: EasyRE for Windows 11 and EasyRE Pro for Windows 11. Continuing a tradition that started with Windows 10, our Windows 11 boot recovery USB is currently available as a completely free download for anyone that needs to fix their Windows 11 installation after a virus infection or a Windows Update gone wrong.
EasyRE is fully compatible with the latest generation of EFI PCs and fixes everything from the original Windows 11 release to problems with the latest Windows 11 22H2 release and beyond.
EasyRE for Windows 11 is probably the easiest and most reliable way to fix BCD boot errors, blue screens during Windows boot, startup errors, EFI bootloader problems, MBR issues and more. You can download EasyRE for Windows 11 for free today, and use it to create a bootable Windows repair USB with the free Easy USB Creator or create a free Windows recovery CD if you prefer that route instead. You just download EasyRE on any working PC, convert the ISO image download to a USB or CD with one of our free tools, then place it in the computer that needs repair and restart it, choosing to boot from the EasyRE CD or USB, and wait for it to load the main menu:
Windows 11 is here and it comes with a new version of Segoe UI Emoji, the font that’s used across the OS to render various emoji from Unicode codepoint sequences to the emoji you see on screen (developers: use Unicode.NET for your emoji needs!). With it, a number of emoji icons have been upgraded to a new look: some to mirror the connotations and semantics of other emoji fonts, others to be less disparaging. But there’s a less welcome surprise too, for those four… maybe five? of us that still remember the ill-fated Windows Phone fondly.
tac
NeoSmart Technologies’ open source (MIT-licensed), cross-platform tac (written in rust) has been updated to version 2.0 (GitHub link). This is a major release with enormous performance improvements under-the-hood, primarily featuring handwritten SIMD acceleration of the core logic that allows it to process input up to three times faster than its GNU Coreutils counterpart. (For those that aren’t familiar with it, tac is a command-line utility to reverse the contents of a file.)
This release has been a long time in the making. I had the initial idea of utilizing vectorized instructions to speed up the core line ending search logic during the initial development of tac in 2017, but was put off by the complete lack of stabilized SIMD support in rust at the time. In 2019, after attempting to process a few log files – each of which were over 100 GiB – I decided to revisit the subject and implemented a proof-of-concept shortly thereafter… and that’s when things stalled for a number of reasons.
Perhaps one of the biggest difficulties in setting up a Linux system for desktop/home use is the fragmentation of the ecosystem, with many different options claiming to get you from point a to somewhere in the vicinity of point b, each with their subtle differences (and at least a few “gotchas” along the way). An easy example: in 2020, you’d think there would be an easy answer to getting a trackpad/touchpad up and running with support for multi-touch gestures at least on par with the experience on Windows and macOS – after all, it’s been 12 years since Apple made multi-touch popular with 2008 MacBook Air.
I have a soft spot in my heart for rust and a passionate distrust (that has slowly turned into hatred) for interpreted, loosely typed languages, but it’s hard to deny the convenience of being able to bang out a bash script you can literally just write and run without having to deal with the edit-compile-run loop, let alone create a new project, worry about whether or not you’re going to check it into version control, and everything else that somehow tends to go hand-in-hand with modern strongly typed languages.
A nifty but scarcely known rust feature is that the language parser will ignore a shebang at the start of the source code file, meaning you can install an interpreter that will compile and run your rust code when you execute the .rs file – without losing the ability to compile it normally. cargo-script is one such interpreter, meaning you can cargo install cargo-script then execute your source code (after making it executable, :! chmod +x %) with something like this:
It’s been a while since we first released our SecureStore.NET library for C# and ASP.NET developers back in 2017, as a solution for developers looking for an uncomplicated way of safely and securely storing secrets without needing to build and maintain an entire infrastructure catering to that end. Originally built way back in 2015 to support secrets storage in legacy ASP.NET applications, SecureStore.NET has been since updated for ASP.NET Core and UWP desktop application development, and now we’re proud to announce the release of SecureStore 1.0 with multi-platform and cross-framework support, with an updated schema making a few more features possible and official implementations in C#/.NET and Rust.
ModelBindingProvider in ASP.NET CoreMicrosoft’s official documentation on adding custom model binding providers to convert between (typically) a string and a custom type for complex model binding in ASP.NET Core as of .NET Core 3.1 goes something like this:
IModelBinder for your class and use [ModelBinder(BinderType = typeof(MyModelEntityBinder)] to decorate each and every binding site, e.g.public async Task<IActionResult> OnPost([ModelBinder(BinderType = typeof(MyModelEntityBinder)]) MyModel model), which provides the runtime with the type information it needs to instantiate the model binding provider and convert the input to a model.IModelBinderProvider class and register it with the ASP.NET Core host to provide the type information ahead-of-time (once and for all), so that you can instead use the barebones and much shorter decoration at each model binding site instead:public async Task<IActionResult> OnPost([ModelBinder] MyModel model)The latter is significantly easier on the eyes and far less error prone… but where does the type registration take place? Per the linked documentation, the recommendation is the following in Startup.cs:
One of the nicest things about ASP.NET Core is the availability of certain singleton models that greatly simplify some very common developer needs. Given that (depending on who you ask) one of the two hardest problems in computing is caching1, it’s extremely helpful that ASP.NET Core ships with several models for caching data, chief of which are IMemoryCache and IDistributedCache, added to an ASP.NET Core application via dependency injection and then available to both the framework and the application itself. Although these two expose almost identical APIs, they differ rather significantly in semantics.2