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Sometimes you want to cast between two types that share the same parent. In one of my resent cases I had two settings objects which shared a parent and I wanted to create a second object from the first and keep the parent data.
Take the following code:
record Parent {
public string Surname { get; init; }
public string Location { get; init; }
}
record Son : Parent {
public string Forename { get; init; }
}
record Daughter : Parent {
public int Age { get; init; }
}
Say you had a Son object and wanted it to be a Daughter and keep the Surname and Location from Parent. You would have to map the fields manually. Fine if you have the one instance of this behaviour with one set of objects, but what if you want to do this repeatedly using different types? I had an ever increasing set of cases where I wanted to move data between object types whilst keeping parent data, so I wrote this method:
public static class ObjectExtensions
{
Posted on Monday the 7th of July 2025
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I recently had to move some clients of an API over from an old endpoint URL to a new one. The new endpoint had completely replaced the old one, with the old endpoint simply being a Route attribute acting as an alias. Having two endpoints for identical functionality was causing confusion, so I couldn't just leave it there despite how harmless it seemed. I also wanted to make this switch at different times for each environment to get people to ensure it's fixed in our pre-production environments before it was fully turned off in prod. In order to facilitate this switch I created a ASP.NET "convention" to allow me to switch this off with a feature flag in appsettings.json.
Here's the "convention" code:
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.ApplicationModels;
namespace Glorious.Api;
public class ConditionalControllerAliasConvention<T> : IApplicationModelConvention where T : ControllerBase
{
private readonly string _aliasRoute;
private
Posted on Friday the 9th of May 2025
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Here's a small method to aid test readability when dealing with sequential numeric ranges:
public static class IntExtensions
{
public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int min, int max)
{
for (int i = min; i < max + 1; i++)
{
yield return i;
}
}
}
It can be used like so:
var range = 2.To(16);
You could have a test like:
var range = 2.To(16);
var expectation = new[] { 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 };
range.Should().BeEquivalentTo(expectation);
In my case it was used for testing methods that group values in ranges by threshold values. Rather than typing out the ranges each time, I made this method to make it less tedious to both read and write.
Posted on Friday the 28th of February 2025
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In order to accommodate working from the van better, I decided to install a 4G antenna and WiFi router. The idea is that, while a phone does work very well, a dedicated antenna outside the Faraday cage that is a van would improve the chances of actually getting a signal vs a phone.
The antenna is a Poynting MIMO-3-12, which is a 2x2 MIMO 2G/3G/4G/LTE/5G antenna. The router is a Huawei B535. There is a small irony in that the router has a 4x4 antenna, which is faster than 2x2, but it isn't quite as strong.
Installing this did require another hole in the roof...
Installation
.
Here is the script to do it (warning, I'm not much of a bash scripter):
#!/bin/bash
Posted on Friday the 16th of June 2023
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Sorry this update has taken so long to make it out, but this happened:
Yeah. The van had an engine swap. There were a series of issues which made it more economical long-term to get a younger engine with fewer miles.
Issues were thus:
- The turbo was on its way out
- Oil leak
- Oil pressure warning
- Coolant leak
- The cam belt needed replacing, which requires dropping the engine anyway
So, given the engine was going to get dropped to replace the cam belt, I figured that replacing the engine was the route to go down given the other issues.
On top of this the gearbox also died on me and that needed replaced. I'd rather it didn't happen at the same time... Naturally having to organise this and source parts and stuff took quite a long time. Finding an engine was super hard and finding someone local to
Posted on Thursday the 3rd of November 2022
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I thought the last post was a big one, but I never imagined this one to be such a mission. This part of the build was done in two stages; one to get a usable toilet and shower for going away on holiday in summer, and then finishing it all off.
Bed partition
So the build is being done from the back to the front, as the design hangs off the bed frame as a core structural component. The first part to this is the partition separating the "bedroom" from the rest of the space. This also acts as the walls for the garage.
First step is to template the wall of the van Cut and test fit the first stage of the partition .
Cab
So a long time ago, back in Part 1, I stripped the cab of its headlining and shelf.
Well, a good 4 months later I finally started working on insulating it. For this I used sheets of 10mm closed cell foam. This also serves to act as a sound dampener on the van metal, as well as thermal insulation. I used 3 layers of this, taking it to 30mm total. Due to the flexibility of the material and curvature of the van it was hard to put these sheets down in a straight line.
