The Lounge - CodeProject

I'm going to be doing an online user group meeting for a couple of UK .NET focused user groups in November.

My intention will be a 90 minute session taking you from very first steps through to getting some simple circuits running on an ESP32 using the .NET Nano framework and C# language.

Dunno if it will be of any use to you, and yes I am aiming for a 90 min (ish) session, but probably in 2 parts.

I'll most likely announce it first on my twitter stream @shawty_ds once the dates are finalised, and have been discussing it in public with those involved for the past week or so now.

I'm actually moving away from the ESP32 and over to STM32 for my commercial stuff.

The ESP32 has got too many issues to be of use for me professionally going forward. We've had no end of grief with CDC serial under the Arduino framework when we made the mistake of trying to use that on our control boards, and the ESP-IDF comes with a number of caveats.

As it is, I've about exhausted the possibilities with it.

Thanks though.

Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx

I've not tried it personally, but .NET Nano framework I have been told, also runs on the STM32

I'm using ESP32 in my demo as that's what I have in my collection of boards, I don't currently posses an STM32, everything I show however, I've been told should work on the STM32.

The session is still in planning at the moment though, won't be until about November when it's aired.

Cheers
Shawty

Ooof, garbage collection on kilobytes of RAM. Personally, not a fan, but then I'm sort of a C and C++ purist, who is still sideeying rust, so don't mind me over here.

Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx

Yea I hear you there, C/C++ and recently rust are where I am.

That said, you might be surprised at how efficient the GC actually is Smile | :)

It's efficient for *some* things.

I used to use it in ISAPI application because they're basically glorified string manipulation engines. String based heap frag is a bear in an environment like that, so I used Boehm Collector to garbage collect my strings and containers. My apps were fast, and stayed fast under load. That was well before ASP.NET.

It's not efficient for general use, compared to C++/RAII without the STL, which is how I recommend coding in IoT with C++.

Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx

Yikes... ISAPI!! still gives me nightmares that does, as does COM, COM+ and DCOM.

.NET Nano is fairly new, nothing to do with MS either (even though they heavily sponsor it etc) it's based very much on the newer core modern .NET stack, and it's Jose Simone and his team that are behind it (Used to be part of that Meadow IoT platform I think)

Not trying to persuade you otherwise here by the way Smile | :)

I've long been a supporter of C/C++ on restrained devices like that, started years ago before the IoT craze as it is now with the likes of the PICMicro.

I just find it quite interesting that C#, a language I quite often get asked to do large enterprise LOB apps in, can run on something like the ESP32, and am frequently surprised by just how well it performs.

I compared it to running modern .NET full/core on an rPI and Nano on an ESP32 kicked it's backside!

FYI, I agree on the issues with opaque file formats. They are generally impossible to use with any kind of change control system and hard to use with version control. We lose the ability to do bulk find/replace or just find references across files/objects. We lose the ability to do intelligent risk management and working at scale becomes exceedingly difficult. (How do you merge changes when two developers both change the same definition?)

People correctly assume these systems make beginning programming/developing easier to learn, but often don't understand how they're making large scale, complex programming harder (ever tried to debug 100 pages of ladder logic?)

Note that even declarative programming output as text has its limits. Data is often stored in (unsorted) dictionaries (hash tables) then persisted to a file in an (effectively) random order, this makes identifying significant changes much harder to find (it's particularly bad when some values are recomputed each time, and thus create thousands of lines of meaningless changes wrapping around real changes and making them hard to find).

JSON is often the format of choice for this type of data. I like JSON; however, it has its limits as a programming language. While generally lighter weight than XML it can still be hard to follow for large files and lacks comments (although JSONC and most JSON parsers now support comments, when enabled). Where JSON falls down is in the need to quote everything. That's where I've started to prefer YAML, which I find easier to read and write, mostly because of the reduced quoting requirements and simplified syntax. That's especially true for embedded scripting which can be done in YAML just by indenting (as opposed to JSON which requires each line of script be quoted and special characters have to be escaped). [I particularly became a YAML fan once I realized it's a superset of JSON, so I can take my existing JSON data structures, drop them into a YAML file and it just works, and I don't have to maintain both a JSON and YAML parser).

Hi All,
There was a Win 11 update which took an age on my home set up. It appears to have broken the old version of office I had (XP), I know it's out of date, I know really I do, But I didn't have a need to update or change it.
My Mum (bless her!) could use it. I did try to update to 2007, but found it a show stopper and my Mum was left clueless. So I am now forced to update to Office 365 to type a letter. Other PC's such as the Win 10 box I have are not affected but not plugged into the Laser Printer. A two minute job becomes a Saga...

In other news, dog bites man.

What do you expect from a company that has fired all of its bug finders?

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.

They don't need to hire bug finders, they have their customers to do all that. Oh, and they don't have bugs since they adopted that wonderful TDD methodology. Hmmm | :|

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
- Thomas Sowell

A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)

glennPattonWork3 wrote:
old version of office I had (XP)

glennPattonWork3 wrote:
I did try to update to 2007

It's 2023.
You might want to trade in the horse and buggy for a new shiny car.

Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

Why fix what works? (or now doesn't)

Truth. Tell me one thing (other than making more $$ for Microsoft) that Office 365 brings to writing a letter as compared to 2007? I'd wager 90% or more of "Office" is never used by the masses.

Charlie Gilley

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759

Has never been more appropriate.

Yep, I had the same problem. A Bonus Windows Activation required too.

A manual reboot with a BSOD SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED on shutdown, then same error after a restart + login. The 3rd reboot fixed the activation issue and all 2016 office apps now work. Good one M$! F$%K ME!

Graeme

"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee

I had a similar issue with my wife's new Win 11 system. I solved it by buying Office 2021 Pro from United Kingdom – Shop Win & Office english[^]. And in case you ask, yes it is a valid distribution and was activated via Microsoft's licencing system.

Just bought one.

I don't know if it's significant but the online activation did not work for me, so I had to use the telephone system. Which is a bit convoluted but still worked.

Seem to be having that issue now...

Richard MacCutchan wrote:
I solved it by buying Office 2021 Pro

I almost did the same until my PC did a triple BSOD and apparently self-repaired the issue. I go into more detail with my previous post.

Graeme

"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee

The last Win11 update took about 5 minutes for me and hasn't broken anything. I don't use MS Office though. I use LibreOffice.

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.

Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???

There's always one Smile | :)

Same here, I abandoned using office years ago and use LibreOffice instead ( A really long ago when it was still OpenOffice ). It has not failed me yet so I will stick to it.

I use Google Office when I can but I find that the raw power is not there and Google Sheets tends to choke and bog down on anything that has more than a handful of formulas and data. Based on that experience, I'm not keen to go M$ 365 online. Nothing beats a locally installed app.

Graeme

"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee

I too prefer local over web, which put me off 365, I know these days it's seen as old fashioned but gimme a local copy preferably from a CD (or DVD). If it's local the web is not needed so speed is constant!

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