Richard Astbury’s Blog | Richard Astbury’s Blog

Jun 1, 2023

GitHub Copilot Tips and Tricks

Some tips and tricks for using GitHub Copilot in VSCode

May 22, 2023

App Modernisation

Modernisation is a journey. It's the continuous acknowledgement that technical debt should be paid down, and that we should be constantly looking for ways to improve our software, and opportunities to make the team more efficient. This could include refactoring, rearchitecting, or rewriting, but it could also include improving the way we work, or the tools we use.

May 9, 2022

SFTP in Azure

Azure Blob Storage now provides the ability to connect to a Container using SFTP.

Mar 22, 2022

Hello Orleans 4.0

With the advent of .NET 6, C# 10 and Orleans 4.0 (preview) it seems like a great time to take a fresh look at Microsoft Orleans.

Aug 9, 2021

Azure Blob Storage Index Tags

Index tags allow you to provide up to 10 key-value pairs for a blob. The tags are indexed, and you can use them to query blobs in your storage account.

Jun 18, 2021

Cryptocurrency Mining in Azure

I thought I would try my hand at mining crypto in the cloud. After all, who wouldn't want to be a bitcoin billionaire?

Jan 28, 2021

Offline maps with vector tiles

On a recent project we wanted to have high quality mapping, but completely offline.

Nov 14, 2020

Adventures in Installing your own Security Camera

I bought a £50 security camera off Amazon to improve security at our home.

Nov 13, 2020

Command Driven Map

I have found an approach that works well when building web based map applications in React.js. I've found in the past that map components can get very complicated very quickly making the map control hard to maintain and hard to add new features to.

Oct 19, 2020

Keeping it Simple

I recently worked on an internal project with a team of grads and inexperienced developers. Five of us in total. It was a short project - a line-of-business application to convert spreadsheets into software. It was a lot of fun.

Aug 14, 2020

Event Driven Map

After implementing maps in react applications a few times, I have found that map components and react have have quite different, and largely incompatible abstractions.

Nov 18, 2019

Converting to TypeScript

On a couple of recent projects at work I've been forced to really use TypeScript. I've emerged from this experience loving the language. I'll attempt to show you what I've discovered.

Jul 4, 2019

Azure Maps Data Service - First Impressions

Azure Maps consists of a set of geospatial REST APIs and a JavaScript web map control. Some of the services (including the data service) are in preview.

Feb 5, 2019

Roll your own Vector Tile service

Vector Tiles are an efficient way of displaying a large amount of data on a mapping control. This post we build a simple vector tile server using node. The server will generate mapping tiles on the fly, and return them to the browser as protobuf encoded vector tiles.

Aug 22, 2018

Rendering leaflet.js tiles in the browser

I wrote a fractral viewer using Leaflet.js which renders map tiles in the browser using a pool of service workers.

May 1, 2018

Lego House

On a recent family trip to Denmark we spent a day at the Lego House in Billund. It's set back behind the Lego theme park, and has only been open for about a year.

Feb 21, 2018

Dev East

Dev East is a single day, single track software developer conference running on 16th March 2018 at Ipswich Town Football Club.

Nov 28, 2017

Bulk inserting data into SQL Server

Let's say with have a simple table in SQL Server in which we want to insert thousands of values (Guids) from a .NET application.

Mar 22, 2017

Review of the HP Envy 13

I was in the market for a new laptop for work. I wanted a 13" (ish) Core i7 (7th gen), 16GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD to replace my 6 year old Lenovo X1. I compared a few laptops on the market, here's the summary

Aug 10, 2016

Benchmarking Image Interpolation in .NET

I am attempting to improve the performance of image resizing in C#.

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