https://rickneeft.dev/A minimal, responsive, and powerful Jekyll theme for presenting professional writing. 2026-07-08T20:31:23+02:00 Rick Neeft https://rickneeft.dev/ Jekyll © 2026 Rick Neeft /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-02-26T07:44:00+01:00 2026-02-26T07:44:00+01:00 https://rickneeft.dev/posts/regex-benchmarks/ Rick Neeft

Regular expressions (regex) are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. In .NET, there are several ways to use regex for matching. The simplest form is: System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.IsMatch("my text", "[a]"); It’s important to note that using Regex.IsMatch(input, pattern) directly is not performant and should generally be avoided. A slightly better approach is to cr...

2025-11-26T17:04:00+01:00 2025-11-26T17:04:00+01:00 https://rickneeft.dev/posts/certificates-current-user/ Rick Neeft

This short post shows how to list certificates from the Current User (Personal) certificate store using C#. The code below prints a table with certificate thumbprints and the certificate common name (CN). It uses Spectre.Console to render a friendly table but the certificate logic itself does not depend on that library. Usage notes: The snippet reads from the Current User personal store (S...

2025-11-07T14:55:00+01:00 2025-11-07T14:55:00+01:00 https://rickneeft.dev/posts/get-me-a-prompt-please/ Rick Neeft

When I’m coding and Copilot is trying to help me, creating a good prompt can sometimes be very challenging. But did you know you can let Copilot create a prompt for you? Context I’m replacing all ILogger messages by moving them into a separate partial class and making use of the source generator ILoggerMessage to prevent boxing when the LogLevel is not logged anyway. Nick Chapsas has a whole Y...

2025-11-02T16:11:00+01:00 2025-11-02T16:11:00+01:00 https://rickneeft.dev/posts/grub-edits/ Rick Neeft

When I boot up my computer, I like to see what’s actually happening. So instead of the splash screen I like to see the boot information. I also prefer to have the GRUB menu appear briefly, in case I need to make quick adjustments such as entering the UEFI menu or booting from an external device. Start by opening a terminal and edit the GRUB configuration file with root privileges: sudo nano /...

2024-07-10T11:46:00+02:00 2024-07-10T11:46:00+02:00 https://rickneeft.dev/posts/sql-updates/ Rick Neeft

When working with SQL databases, there might be times when you need to add a new column to an existing table. If this column is meant to be mandatory (i.e., it cannot be NULL), you need to ensure that all existing rows have a default value before enforcing the NOT NULL constraint. Here’s a simple step-by-step template to accomplish this. -- Add the new column (allowing NULLs initially) ALTER T...