Tag Archives: programming

Why certain programs launch fine on Start > Run on Windows but not from the command line

On windows, if you run a program such as Chrome.exe (Google Chrome Web Browser) via control + R (run) it will launch without a hitch as long as the browser is installed.

However, if you open the command line and you attempt to run “chrome.exe” it will complain that the executable is not found in the %PATH%

This is because Control+R also looks up the registry values within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\

Which include all apps ever installed such as Chrome.exe, Firefox.exe, Excel.exe, Illustrator.exe, etc.

So if you are ever writing a program in your programming language of choice, using a Windows Registry check of the location (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths) for whatever.exe will be the perfect solution when that program is not in the System Environment variable %PATH%

Useful software development tools

This post is meant to be updated with useful tools for software development. I will only classify the tool and post a link to it, this post will be helpful for someone just starting out in devOps

API

  • Postman: allows to share, test, document & monitor APIs.

IDE

  • Visual Studio: Windows software development IDE (C#/WPF)
  • Jetbrains Webstorm: Javascript IDE that becomes powerful with plugins (I use it for writing Go code)

Text editors

Must have tools

  • Git (or Github Desktop or Git for Windows)
  • Linux terminal/bash (available on any Mac/Linux machine, for Windows download Git for Windows linked above)

Quick C# Programming Notes on String Formatting

Here is a few examples on the different ways to format strings when outputting data to the user. Computers usually store numbers without formatting.

Some of these notes will tell you the exact code you would need to make a computer’s “224” to be outputted as “$224” or “224 %”.

Continue reading