Not very often, when I’m looking for a new tool to replace some annoying or outdated piece of software, I have to blog about it … but from time to time, I’m discovering pearls, worth to lose a word about.

The Windows 10 built-in media player Groove is (to be kind) … nice, but it is more or less a leftover from Microsoft’s attempt to create a competitor to iTunes, years ago. The crippeled UI is not the most modern and I was more than once annoyed about its usability.

Doing a research for a good alternative, you stumble always over the usual suspects: MediaMonkey, Foobar2000, Winamp, VLC or even Media Player Classic!? Not modern enough, not user friendly enough, not lean enough.

I really don’t remember where, but there was a screenshot of a player, which seems to be the complete opposite of the others: Dopamine from Digimezzo, a project by the Belgian developer Raphaël Godart…

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If you run a blog, it is always advisable to integrate a commenting system, in order to get feedback on your posts from your readers.

So did I, when I start this blog and I decided to use the Disqus platform, as it was very easy to integrate … but I always had a bad feeling about a third-party platform collecting data from my readers. Disqus is probably not without reason under criticism by many people in the community.

As I host this blog at GitHub (see A New Blog (Part One): VS Code, Hexo and GitHub Pages) I was looking for a solution to host the comments also on my prefered platform. There were some solutions, which uses GitHub Issues for this and wanted to implement something like that someday.

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Every developer has to have an idea of versioning his products. If you work with Visual Studio you have the Assembly Information in the project properties dialog, to enter it manually everytime you want to release a new version:

The four fields are: MAJOR, MINOR, BUILD, REVISION.

But seriously … who does that? I guess 99% of all C# developers are entering the AssemblyInfo.cs and enter the famous 2 asterisks into the version declaration of BUILD and REVISION, to let Visual Studio do the incrementation job:

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[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*.*")]
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.*.*")]

But this is not the end of the possibilities … Let’s do it more meaningful, with some goodies and still automatic…

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Every article in this blog has an individual header image, to bring a little bit color into it. In this post I will show you how I deal with the images in using and automatic provisioning.

For serving these pictures I use a static folder, as described in A New Blog: Customizing Hexo. The hard work is done by the plugin Hexo Generator Copy, which copies the static files into the public_dir while generating.

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There are plenty of editors out there to help you writing JavaScript web applications. As I’m working in my daily life with Visual Studio, it is a obvious choice for me.

One of the most time saving tools in VS is the plugin ResXManager, which is an awesome assistant on managing the translations for a Desktop- or ASP.NET-App, which uses XML-based RESX files.

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If you are working with freelance developers and Azure DevOps/TFS with TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) in your company, maybe this will look familiar to you: You hire a new freelancer and you want to reuse the hardware, including the complete software setup, to bring him/her to work as fast and straightforward as possible. You set up a new Azure Devops account with all necessary permissions and you think you’re done. No you are not…

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Often it is important to trigger an event, after the user of your website/web app has filled out an text input. You have to do something with the given value in JavaScript.

The intended event for this is change, which will be triggered, when the user has ended changing by leaving the input with his cursor, mostly by using the TAB key. This works at some degree, if there is a physical keyboard, but not really on mobile devices … and for me is leaving the field often too late to start the upcoming event.

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While writing my post Hexo and the Dark Mode a few days ago, I thought it would be nice, if I could switch between the normal (light) and the dark theme, I’ve created for the support of the OS-related Dark Mode, even manually. The only thing I needed was a toggle element and a little bit of JavaScript.

Of course, I couldn’t manipulate the media query prefers-color-scheme itself, but introduce a different way by blog uses it. Instead of implementing the media query directly into my CSS (or Stylus) code, I used a root selector, which can be manipulated by JavaScript … something like this:

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body {
    background-color: white;
    color: black;
}

[data-theme="dark"] body {
    background-color: black;
    color: white;
  }
}

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