Paul Hadfield

Last year, as part of a series of posts, I asked "Are you investing in your own career?". This, in part, came about from a great quote that heard:Do you have 10 years experience, or 1 year's experience repeated 10 times?I think the majority of developers starting out are fired up and excited every day. Everything is new, everything is a challenge. Just getting something to work, no matter how, is a success.It can also be amazingly frustrating and tiring to be constantly learning and actively building your knowledge / skill-set. It's probably not a surprise therefore that it is so easy / appealing to back off a little bit for a break once you have learnt enough to satisfy the day job. Similar to over training in sport, it's probably even a good idea - no one can do anything flat out indefinitely.But what happens when you just continue backing off? The hard truth is, rather than continuing to build your experience, you do slowly start to fall into the trap o…

If you're trying to access a class library (.NET Standard) from a traditional console application (in VS2017 those can be found under 'Windows Classic Desktop') you will run into problems; which can feel a little strange for something that was pretty simple in VS2015 and earlier. You can add a reference to the class library project (Resharper will even volunteer to add the dependency / namespace reference if you don't already have it). But the code won't then compile, it will complain that it can't find the namespace referenced in the using and it also won't be able to find any of the objects that you reference in the class library. Took me a bit of figuring out but you need to open up the properties for the class library project, look at the conditional compilation symbols in the build tab (it might be something like 'NETSTANDARD1_4'). You need to take this symbol and duplicate it in the build tab of the console application. You should now be…