Now I have a real, not controversial question. Many times using a specific technology I get stack and despite years of experience (in other similar technologies) it seems I'm not able to go on. Maybe a colleague can help me, maybe they can't. Many "experts" say that they haven't had any problems in that area, but you see a lot of people that either: 1) keep changing their technology stack because they keep bumping into problmes 2) stop learning because novelities are such difficult to integrate 3) resort to already integrated tools that are less customizable (and less powerful) (microsoft benefits from these people). I want to say openly that I often bump into problems expecially in open source stacks. I often need help and I struggle to find it.

Have you ever used Hibernate Tools for reverse engineering a database? Seems to work only on eclipse. Do you know of a process to configure eclipse to do what it's supposed to in a finite and predictable number of steps? Or the only way is an unpredictable trial and error process in which everythime a component is updated the stack stops working?

Even if Microsoft has done considerably steps forward in recent years with dotnet core being an open source platform, it still retains a bit of its microsoftian dna. Let me make an example. Start a new test project with xUnit. It doesn't log to console. Decide to use the standard Microsoft.Extensions.Logging that should be the new, performant way of logging. It comes with 4 providers and **it doesn't log on file system**. Bottom line: all the complexity of a complex stack without the solution you were looking at the beginning. Resorting to thirdy party tools to do the job (serilog).

Little, sad story:
dotnet add package Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json
error: There are no versions available for the package 'Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json'

There is no microsoft packaging technology that works out of the box. Ever.

Ok, we were troubleshooting a network connection problem. My boss told me: use fping, a small command line utility that gives you a timestamped ping. We can then check when did the connection go down. Ok. Since I've always advocated the importance of knowing advanced scripting tools, i tried to do it with powershell. I've been playing with Test-Connection for an hour to try to get not only the timestamp when the connection is ok, but the timestamp when the connection is down. Don't want to go into details. I've just a question. A solution that allows you to do such an easy task in say 20 lines of code is the proof that the system works or that it doesn't work? To make long story short, now i'm downloading fiping.

Powershell. Using classes. Can't create class libraries using regular .ps1 files (this way this **sort** of work). Using modules then. Can't easily refresh modules cache after any change to a class. Need restarting powrshell each time. Looking for more information. The issue is open since 2016 (just after the release of PS 5 that introduced classes). Once again, a Microsoft product turns out to be shiny at the beginning, but rusty when you go beyond the surface. Classes seem to be second class citizens in powershell. I feel frustrated and I would like to put pressure on microsoft but nobody seems to care. I'm stuck.

I've a classic class in C#: RelayCommand. It's just a general purpose ICommand implementation. I want to use a dedicated namespace for it. I cannot use MyCompany.RelayCommand because using the same-class-name as namespace causes problems. What do you suggest?

I've a collection of ViewModels:
ViewModelCollection
but there is a specialized version for model based viewmodels:
ModelBasedViewModelCollection
and from this I derived a furtherly specialized version that handles deferred adds:
ModelBasedViewModelCollectionWithDeferredAdd.
Now this is ridicously long. How would you abbreviate this?
This is the kind of questions that, if posted on stackoverflow, cause you to be downvoted to death. Maybe here we can discuss a little bit without me being banned right away :-)

I've created a folder called 'config' in my c# applicaiton. (VS2017). It considers it a 'hidden' folder, like obj and bin. Still it works. Am i doing something illegal? That is, Visual Studio wants to handle the content of 'config' directly?

Visual Studio. Slow cheetah plugin allows you to transform your app.config so to have different files for release and build. yes, because with Visual Studio 2017 we need a third-party tool to do that. Are there any vs-native alternatives? Yes. Are they good? So and so. That's what I think, but slowcheetah has 300k downloads, so many people seem to be using it.

When you add a new file to a project, Visual Studio shows only the types that it thinks are relevant.
It's based on a guid in the .csproj file. Yes, a guid.
A magic number, only longer.
Changed to another one that allows me to add the files, added the files, restored previous number. Project unloadable, restored with git, lost several hours of work. If only I committed before trying this. Lesson learned. Trust git. Never trust Visual Studio.

Important rule of programming: don't swallow exception and provide details for troubleshooting.

Visual Studio: The project file contains a property value that is not valid.