Hacking Bangkok Blog

Tech and Living in Thailand's City of Angels

The Hacking Bangkok blog covers I.T. and technology in general, and my experiences working and living in the Kingdom of Thailand. Bangkok has a very long Thai name, which starts with Krung thep - City of Angels.
Bangkok sunset from my bedroom balcony

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Four Years Post-Bangkok, and Life Goes On

Wow, it's been four years since I moved back to the U.S. - to Oregon, specifically - and about that long since my last blog post.  In that time, I've bought a house, and had a second son!  After a couple jobs as Senior Software Engineer (at CarePayment) and then Principal Software Engineer (at Arris), I moved on earlier this year to Amazon Web Services (AWS), as an Enterprise Solutions Architect.

For the first time in my life, my primary computer (my work laptop) is a Mac, specifically a MacBook Pro, which is really nice hardware and a great (retina) screen.  It's pretty similar to working on a Windows 7 machine, really, although Microsoft Office (specifically, Outlook) is missing a lot of features.  And I've had to learn a bunch of new shortcuts, etc.  One thing I really missed was being able to create .NET apps, and using a nice IDE like Visual Studio.  Between that and the missing Office features, I started looking at buying my own ThinkPad, and getting it imaged with the Amazon corporate OS image (we can't hook it up to the network otherwise).  I also have an Amazon-provided virtualized Windows machine (via Amazon Workspaces) accessed via the RDP-like Workspaces client.  That's usually good enough if bandwidth is okay, and I installed Visual Studio 2015 Community edition on it, etc.

On my Mac, though, I installed Visual Studio Code, a stripped-down IDE, sometime in May I think.  But it wasn't until today that I decided to try out the new c# plug-in for it, and the .NET Core install for Mac OS X.  Along with a few other tools (Yeoman, installed via npm), it actually allowed me to create a new ASP.NET MVC project (complete with skeleton views and controllers, and HTML, and Boostrap for UI), and run it.  On a Mac.  If you remember Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft, you know why this sorta blows my mind.

Here's the screenshot (note the localhost URL):


Sweeeet!

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