All about change

moving time, packing boxes to relocate …

Followers of my Soft as in Software YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/softasinsoftware) or my Soft as in Software Twitch channel (https://twitch.tv/softasinsoftware) already know that I created a new WordPress hosted on Azure site to start a new Soft as in Software blog as well as a new Azure website. On the blog I will post updates on what happens in my multimedia world called Soft as in Software. In this Soft as in Software blog I will discuss the videos that I post on YouTube, or the Live Coding streams streamed on Twitch and YouTube (I’m restreaming my Live Coding sessions to both Twitch and YouTube).

The Soft as in Software website will become the main landing site containing pointers to my YouTube channel and all related projects around it.

The Soft as in Software Blog can be found either directly on the blog link: https://blog.softasinsoftware.com or indirectly via my, also new Soft as in Software website https://www.softasinsoftware.com. Both work in progress, to see how I’m progressing subscribe to my YouTube channel or follow my Twitch channel as I will work on these sites live in my Live Loding sessions.

What does this mean for -this- blog? Well, I will keep using this for my personal rants, some comments on what is happening in my personal life and what is happening in the world. To avoid breaking all sorts of links and references I will keep my ‘old’ posts available on this blog, but I also ported these posts to my new Soft as in Software blog.

It will be a split in content. If you are interested in me as a person your best guess will be to stick with this blog. If you are more interested in the tech and multimedia posts following the ‘other’ blog is for you. On this other blog I will be discussing all sorts of topics like Azure, Programming Languages, Machine Learning but also for a large part my niche specialty: Office Development. These posts may vary from basic entry level to more advanced skilled topics in deep dives. I might even start ‘blogging’ my own books on some subjects.

With this move I hope to get better focused content related to both areas. No one will be waiting for stories about my kids growing up (they are close to becoming adults already, if only they would also start to act like an adult) or my opinions on COVID-19 in a tech blog and no one likes to know how to setup a self-hosted WordPress site or create a Blazor web assembly site on a personal blog with family or travel information.

Let me know in the comments what you think, and I hope to see you on either side maybe even on both sides! Obviously, you can both follow my personal blog and the tech blog if you like, I’m happy to see you in either place!

Advertisement

Happy 2020

It’s been a while, almost year, here … and whenever there is a new year, we pick up our resolutions from last year and see what we can do that we missed progressing the past year. Blogging is one of these things … so let’s pick this up again for now and see where it ends.

In my professional work I’ve been limited in doing things programmer-wise, more a people manager than coding manager at this time. Trying to get our foreign team up and running and at sometimes actually deliver some products. Doing so means I have almost no time at all to do programming.

For this reason, I decided to go on and do the Live Coding thing. Forcing me to go live in front of a camera and coding live on screen is pushing me to keep my coding skills on par. Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!

So join me in my Live Coding sessions on Twitch. You can find my channel here:

https://twitch.tv/MaartenVanStam

Hit the follow button if you are, like me, too lazy to look up the broadcast schedule so you get notified whenever I get online to do the Programming Thing.

At this time I’m working on two main topics:

· Office Development (Who would have guessed?) where I’m trying to do the same things that I was able to do using VSTO to build my Add-ins. Spoiler Alert: You can’t do everything you were able to do with VSTO, but you can do some cool shit anyway …

· Blazor Web Development, building web sites using C# and .NET Core … where Office moved away from .NET to Web Technologies .NET did exactly the other way around and is now focusing on Web Technologies!

Let me know what you think about all these new and not so recent technologies … will they save the world?

Open Live Writer – Windows Live Writer Open Sourced!

If you have been using Windows Live Writer to do your blogging you know it was a bit of a PITA to get this up and running on your current platform. Well, this now will change as Microsoft added this to their stack of Open Source software, to keep it alive and allow you to propose enhancements:

“Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the well–loved but not actively developed Windows Live Writer code. Open Live Writer is provided under a MIT license.”

If you read this it is the evidence that it works, as it is written using the download link to the Open Live Writer installer you can find here:

Download

Go to the Open Live Writer website and read all the details, or even better … fork it and start working on it!

http://openlivewriter.org/

Have Fun!