Good news is that it is possible to handle both C++ and C# targets in a single CMake project, which makes the maintenance much easier: no need to involve a yet another build system, not need to use an IDE - everything can be done with CMake and bare CLI. Bad news is that some things will work only on Windows.

Since we already had a .NET/MVC-based website for distribution-related stuff, we added this functionality there, and that turned out to be a rather trivial task. The .NET/MVC has nothing to do with it really - that’s just what we had, and you’ll see for yourself that this can be done with any other framework or even with a bare static website.

I should have published this article much earlier before the App Center retirement date, and I was intending too, but I just never found time, sorry about that.

Around the same time I entered the domain of home automation. At first it was just Homely (a norwegian home security system), which comes with their own hub and a (not very large) set of supported devices/sensors. But soon enough I discovered that it’s all just a Zigbee network wrapped into a user-friendly package, so I could do more with my own hub and a much wider (and cheaper) collection of devices and sensors. Shortly after that realization I stumbled upon Home Assistant, as all roads lead to it, and, you guessed it right, I decided to host and run it on that same Vero V device.

This particular example will be about a Kotlin-based application. I don’t know what would be different in case of a Java-based application, but I suppose that principal things should be more or less the same in both.

But two days ago my website suddenly went down along with the server and all the content on it. Without a notice/warning, with no explanation and without a way to restore the data (fortunately, I haven’t actually lost any).

A couple of years ago I compiled a Qt-based application into WebAssembly using Emscripten, and I did mention pthreads there too, but it was very briefly and without any details. And as it turned out, there are some interesting moments in there which are worth being documented.

As there is a limit for how long one can postpone one’s ignorance, it finally came a time for me to investigate the matter, which I did by (reading the documentation and) conducting a small experiment of my own.

But it’s not just already published parts, there are some new things too: in particular, I’ve managed to build Qt (both shared and static configurations) and used it to build my own applications.

Yes, I’ve got my very own Steam Deck too. And as many have already said, it does exceed all the expectations (and then some).

Шёл я к этому достаточно долго, и было это не очень просто. Но самой сложной частью было найти работу в Норвегии, чтобы выехать из России; а после переезда в Норвегию процесс становления гражданином протекал, можно сказать, в автоматическом режиме, потому что от меня самого требовалось довольно немного, и мало что (если вообще хоть что-то) могло пойти не так.

Я бы не сказал, что это рекламная статья, хотя в ней действительно есть ссылки вида “свяжитесь с нашими консультантами” и там и сям упоминается коммерческая лицензия. Как бы то ни было, на Хабре статья так и не вышла, но вот теперь спустя четыре года (лучше поздно, чем никогда) выходит здесь.

This article in english 🇺🇸.

All the work on that PoC was single-handedly done by Mikhail Svetkin, who was an embedded software developer in The Qt Company back at the time, and looks like the post was taken down at some point after he left the company (Internet Archive has the last snapshot on 2019-05-02). Perhaps the new project owner didn’t like something about that article?

Anyway, I thought I’ll resurrect the post and publish it here for the history. Everything below is published almost as it was in the original post in the Qt blog.

Эта статья на русском 🇷🇺.

I’ve heard about vcpkg before and even tried to make a vcpkg package for one library a couple of years ago, but back then I didn’t find documentation for this (as I now understand, that’s because one does not really create a “package”) and abandonned the task. I never thought I’ll be looking at vcpkg again, but recently I discovered that some teams have been switching from Conan to vcpkg, which sounded intriguing and promising, as we still needed a package manager for our projects.

We don’t collect any of this data on our websites (we probably could, at least on those where we control the authentication process, but we don’t). The only piece of information that we do have about our visitors (aside from IP-addresses in web-servers access logs) is their e-mails and GUIDs, thanks to SAML SSO. That might not seem like much, but knowing just the e-mails (or GUIDs) is actually quite enough, as one can use Microsoft Graph to query more data using those. And for the actual analytics purposes that data can then be visualized/presented using Matplotlib charts.

(Of course) we chose ASP.NET Core MVC for making the portal. And as both ASP.NET and Active Directory have been around for a while, and given the fact that both come from the same vendor, one would expect that implementing Active Directory users authentication via LDAP in such a setup to be a well-known topic with detailed documentation, examples and a lot of tutorials available. But as fucking usual, it’s not quite like that.