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ℹ️ Info: This post was linked in the WLED discussions and the script may make it to the WLED project. Introduction WLED is a powerful open-source solution for controlling addressable LEDs over Wi-Fi, making it popular for DIY smart lighting projects. However, maintaining backups of your WLED configurations can be tedious, especially when managing multiple devices. In this post, I’ll demonstrate a simple bash-based backup solution that discovers WLED devices on your network, pulls their configurations, and saves them locally for easy restoration. The scripts are intended for Linux-based systems and can be scheduled with cron for fully automated backups. ...

I had a use case for EF Core where I wanted to query a database view while still supporting classic add/update/delete methods on the base table. Specifically, I wanted to enrich entities with computed values, like a lookup or label, but allow full CRUD support. Example Problem Suppose we have two entities: Entity: (Id, DeviceId) Friendly: (DeviceId, FriendlyName) The goal is to filter Entity records by FriendlyName, even though it’s not part of the table directly. ...

In EF Core, you can easily filter to a list of known values using LINQ: int[] ids = { 1, 3, 7 }; myContext.Posts.Where(s => ids.Contains(s.Id)); But what if the list of values includes composite keys, like Type and Name? var filterBy = new[] { (PostTypes.Blog, "First"), (PostTypes.KnowledgeBase, "Last") }; myContext.Posts.Where(s => filterBy.Contains((s.Type, s.Name))); // But how? There’s no direct Contains() support for tuples or composite keys in EF Core. A Stack Overflow post outlines several options. Here, I’ll focus on Option 6 — building an expression tree to generate a SQL query like: ...

At work, we maintain a product with 400+ projects spread over 15 repositories. Making changes across them is painful—especially when debugging SDK-level code and publishing local packages repeatedly. To make this smoother, I created a tool: ElephantProject (also on NuGet). ElephantProject swaps NuGet <PackageReference>s with <ProjectReference>s, and generates solution files for local dev. These changes are never committed—this is for local development only. Use Case – Refactoring In my local dev directory (called “Work”), I clone all the repositories. Then I run: ...

This is part of my guide on how I manage multiple GitHub repositories. This post focuses on streamlining shared content, such as workflows and configuration files. Back to main guide. File Sets I define sets of reusable files that can be applied across multiple repositories: standardContent: Generic files like .gitignore standardDotnetNuget: Shared .NET workflows and Directory.Build.props standardDocker: Docker-related workflows and .dockerignore These sets are declared in repos.json: { "content": { "standardContent": { ".gitignore": "standard_content/.gitignore" }, "standardDocker": { ".github/workflows/docker-dev.yml": "standard_content/docker-dev.yml" } }, "repositories": { "LordMike/MBW.BlueRiiot2MQTT": { "standardContent": true, "standardDocker": true } } } Each repository opts into content sets by enabling the respective boolean key. ...