Turning a code sample into an image sounds simple until the image needs to look like the code inside Visual Studio. Copying text into a design tool loses editor colors and formatting. Taking a normal screen capture...

Schemastore.org began as a simple idea: a central hub for JSON schemas. Today, it’s a global resource powered by community contributions. To keep it free and reliable, we’re inviting for-profit organizations to sponsor and support its continued growth.

At our house, we use home automation for a lot of different things. One of them is the ability to get a quick overview of the state of our appliances such as the washer, dryer and dishwasher. That way we don’t...

After showing some pictures of our smart home dashboard , questions started coming in about the cables going in behind the books. Where is the modem and what else is going on? Spoiler alert, the books are fake. Here you...

I’ve had some questions lately about how we keep track of all the home automation devices spread across the house. So, I thought I’d share how our dashboard is set up. The dashboard is the web-based SharpTools that runs...

Motion, contact, and light sensors are the most commonly used sensors for home automations in my house. With these sensors, you can make a wide variety of automations. But there are so many different manufacturers, protocols, and price points that it can be hard to choose which devices to buy and use.

Here are a bunch of home automation ideas for your inspiration. These are examples of automation rules that have worked well for my family. They might work well for yours too. The ideas are technology agnostic and...

A short list of best practices to follow when automating your home

Shows how to modify an existing extension to support Visual Studio 2019

I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual...