Dev | Author | Military Husband | Clergy Spouse | Microsoft MVP Everything here is my own--as you'd expect | he/him
UK
Joined July 2007
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I'm not on here much, so you may find me on some other social network:
mrlacey.com/p/socials.html
Do you use any of my Visual Studio extensions?
If so, an upvote of this would be appreciated:
developercommunity.visualstu…
Key (to me) functionality has stopped working in VS2026
Congrats to all involved. (especially Michael)
I never imagined I'd be considered a 4-time hall of famer in anything.
🦙 #WindowsDev did you know the #WindowsCommunityToolkit is 9 years old?! 🎉 Learn about the whole history from start to now here: github.com/CommunityToolkit/… #WinUI #UnoPlatform #UWP #dotnet #MVVM #XAML #Windows
Based on more time spent testing app launches than I now realize I ever wanted to spend.
mrlacey.com/2025/07/how-quic…
It's longer than I realized since I plugged in this machine 😬
#windev
ALT Pc clock showing the date as 01/02/2023
So, this is pretty awesome. An extra motivation for me to want to start organising events to meet agin in person ... youtu.be/dVG8W-0p6vg?si=XyIu…
I'm currently writing a load of scheduled blog posts, but before I publish them, I don't think enough people have read this post about pizza and developers:
mrlacey.com/2025/07/why-feed…
Part of a text based "artificial intelligence" interaction from a solution I was testing 9 years ago!
Dear everyone who contributes to open source projects (especially the ones I use) please know that I'm super grateful for all your time and dedication
Dear people talking about software development:
Beware saying
"This is the way it must be done"
When you mean
"This is a way it can be done"
I know having a single way of thinking about things makes life simpler, but life is complex and nuanced - just like software requirements
Developers: we don't read documentation
Also developers: The software/tools/libraries we use should have more/better documentation
Also developers: we don't want to write documentation
Also developers: the software we build is so intuitive to use it doesn't need documentation!
Dear streaming apps, why do you send me notifications about new episodes (or films) that you know I've already watched?
Similarly,
news apps, why send me notifications about stories you know I've already read?
When the docs are vague, Copilot can only make up answers that look correct but are absolutely nonsense and a search of GitHub shows no one is using the API I can't get to work,
It must be time for a different approach.
Programming Language Design in the Era of LLMs: A Return to Mediocrity? kirancodes.me/posts/log-lang…
I built an MCP server to help improve my XAML. Here's what I learned linkedin.com/pulse/i-built-m…
2 things I'm hearing a lot, but I'm not sure if they're conflicting:
1) "AI dev tools are only as good as a junior programmer."
2) "We're not hiring senior developers anymore as we can hire [cheaper] junior devs and have them use AI"
#CognitiveDissonance
I haven't been working with other developers for a while, but I 100% guarantee there are people who submit PRs for manual review, have things flagged for correction and then blame the problem on the fact the original code was written by AI.
As if they weren't responsible
AI code gen tools were trained on public code repositories.
People use AI to generate code and find it's messy, buggy, poorly structured and hard to understand.
Have you looked at most public code repositories?
#GIGO