I’m making an effort to post more regularly. However, before I really get going I need to clean up a few things in the posts I’m creating. In particular I want to stop posting pictures of source code. It drives me nuts. On one hand it looks good, but you my reader can’t do anything with it. In order to work with the code you have to download the code from my github repository.

To fix this I’m playing around to see what I need to do. The first thing is that I can wrap code in [code] … [/code] tags which does most of the work. However, I use Microsoft Word to compose my posts. If I paste source code in to Word and use the [code] tags you get something like this:

<span style="color:blue;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">public<span style="color:black;">
				<span style="color:blue;">static<span style="color:black;">
						<span style="color:blue;">void<span style="color:black;"> Main(<span style="color:blue;">string<span style="color:black;">[] args)
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">        {
</span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">
			<span style="color:blue;">var<span style="color:black;"> host = <span style="color:blue;">new<span style="color:black;">
							<span style="color:#2b91af;">WebHostBuilder<span style="color:black;">()
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">                .UseKestrel()
</span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">                .UseContentRoot(<span style="color:#2b91af;">Directory<span style="color:black;">.GetCurrentDirectory())
</span></span></span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">                .UseStartup<<span style="color:#2b91af;">Startup<span style="color:black;">>()
</span></span></span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">                .UseApplicationInsights()
</span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">                .Build();
</span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">            host.Run();
</span>

<span style="color:black;font-family:Consolas;font-size:9pt;">        }</span>

You’re better off if I just post a picture. So this means I’ll have a slightly more complex workflow than I want, but it will produce a better quality product. Eventually I’ll figure out a way to automate it. What I plan to do is just leave annotations in my post. They’ll look like:

[code language=”csharp”]

CoreTestApp/program.cs:12-22

[/code]

I’ll post the article to the drafts folder on WordPress and then add the source code manually in WordPress’s editor. Done that way the code looks like this:

public static void Main(string[] args)
{

var host = new WebHostBuilder()
.UseKestrel()
.UseContentRoot(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory())
.UseStartup<Startup>()
.UseApplicationInsights()
.Build();

host.Run();
}

Hopefully this will immediately yield a better article for my readers. And later I’ll figure out how to automate the process so I can just publish in one step without any manual interventions.