Those who follow me on Twitter (@markwilsonit) may be aware that I’m attempting to learn some C# skills in my spare time (what little of that I have).  It’s not my first foray into coding – I have a Computer Studies degree and, in my youth I wrote code in a variety of languages (BASIC, C, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, 68000 assembler, COBOL, Visual Basic, C++ and probably some others too) but aside from a little bit of C++ on the Arduino and the odd bit of PowerShell, I haven’t done much in the last 20 years.  As my career moves further towards management I’m increasingly convinced it’s technology I enjoy though – and I’m seriously considering a move from infrastructure to software…

Anyway…

I’ve been following a Pluralsight C# course from Scott Allen (@ode2code) and, part way through, Scott uses System.Speech to demonstrate adding references to assemblies.  I had a play, adapting something I’d written earlier to talk to me as well as output to the console – nothing grand – just a bit of fun.  After showing it to my sons, the eldest (who is 9), described it as “epic” (which I understand is pretty good) and I tweeted, only to be amused by a reply which suggested the same library had caused hilarity in Duncan Smart (@DuncanSmart)’s household:

@markwilsonit Add a reference to System.Speech, mine thought it was hilarious https://t.co/y8CZhw6nQy

— Duncan Smart (@duncansmart) April 25, 2014

Small world, eh!

I followed the link to Duncan’s code and thought “Hmm… GitHub… I use that for my Arduino code… I wonder if…” – and yes, Visual Studio can publish to GitHub too.  It took some work to suss it out though, so here’s what I did (following advice on StackOverflow)…

1. In Visual Studio, select File then Add to Source Control (which creates a local Git repository)
2. On GitHub, create a new reposotory (but don’t initialise it with a README – Visual Studio wants an empty repository.
3. Copy the HTTPS URI for the new repo, then go back to Visual Studio, open Team Explorer, select Home then Unsynced Commits and enter the GitHub URL before clicking Publish.
4. You may find that you have to commit the changes locally first, which in my case required creating a local username and supplying an email address.
5. After committing, the solution should be visible on GitHub.

For reference, I was using Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop.