Homepage

I’m Andy Sprague, a professional financial services software developer. I work for http://nephilaclimate.com/, a global leader in the business of weather and climate resilience risk transfer, as their technology lead.

This blog contains some bite-sized development blogs about topics I have come across on my coding journey. I try my best to assume little to no development knowledge, and avoid TLA’s (Three Letter Acroymns) as much as possible, as we all know there are way too many of those in this field.

Code samples to accompany these blogs can be found in my repo at https://bitbucket.org/andysprague44.

Hope you find something interesting!

Blogs

• My First Custom Excel-DNA Add-In (dotnet6 edition)March 14, 2023
  This is an upgrade to my earlier blog “My First Custom Excel Ribbon using Excel-DNA“, now written for dotnet core. I add in Microsoft.Extensions support for dependency injection, configuration, and for logging, which should be an easy way to hook up to your app settings, plus quickly set-up your DI and logging frameworks of choice (e.g.Continue reading “My First Custom Excel-DNA Add-In (dotnet6 edition)”
• Super Power your git configMarch 10, 2023
  git is the defacto way to manage source code, if you haven’t heard of git this blog is not for you. If you are a software developer, data scientist, data engineer, dev ops engineer or frankly in any role that touches software development, and you haven’t heard of git … well, where have you been?Continue reading “Super Power your git config”
• Diagrams as Code – C4 diagrams with Azure iconsJanuary 11, 2023
  This article is very persuasive. By the end you will wonder why you ever used Visio. It gets more technical as you progress, so stop reading whenever you want (I suppose this is true whether I wrote this sentence or not). I discuss: Just want the code? https://github.com/andysprague44/sprague.andy.plantuml.c4 C4 C4 diagrams are a great wayContinue reading “Diagrams as Code – C4 diagrams with Azure icons”
• Python – (Ab)Using EnvironmentsDecember 2, 2022
  So I recently picked up a legacy(ish) python application that had a CI/CD pipeline that built from a setup.py file (think: python setup.py build). I wanted to create a local dev environment using the only sensible choice (excluding docker) – conda. I also wanted to utilize an environment.yml file to give new developers a veryContinue reading “Python – (Ab)Using Environments”
• Azure Table Storage – QueryAsyncDecember 4, 2020
  Quick one today. I have been playing around with Azure Table Storage using the “WindowsAzure.Storage” library in dotnet, and was failing to find anything useful on querying multiple rows. Using the ‘TableContinuationToken’ was a little confusing to me, and a lot of the example on the net are out of date (who knows, this mayContinue reading “Azure Table Storage – QueryAsync”
• Flask Blueprint for Microsoft Azure AAD AuthenticationNovember 11, 2020
  This blog post takes you through adding authentication to a Flask application, using a blueprint, connecting to Microsoft Azure AAD using MSAL Python library. The hope is, you can grab the blueprint, and drop it in to your flask application, authentication done bish-bash-bosh, and then spend your time doing the more interesting stuff. You won’tContinue reading “Flask Blueprint for Microsoft Azure AAD Authentication”
• NetOffice.Excel – Add Validation to a CellNovember 30, 2017
  My most recent blogs have been focused on Excel-DNA, and the pretty cool ability it brings to easily add your own custom ribbons.  This blog is looking at the other component of writing a C# app that can talk to Excel – namely NetOffice.Excel. NetOffice.Excel provides the ability to interact with Excel COM elements, inContinue reading “NetOffice.Excel – Add Validation to a Cell”
• Custom Icons in Excel-DNA Custom RibbonJuly 3, 2017
  When adding options to your menu, you’ll need icons.  There are about 9,000 already available icons (yikes!), so you’ll probably find one that is suitable and is consistent with the UX of Excel.  You can also add custom icons.  As always code is available on my bit bucket account: https://bitbucket.org/andysprague44/excel-dna-examples/…CustomImage Built-in icons You can addContinue reading “Custom Icons in Excel-DNA Custom Ribbon”
• Show Message Boxes with Excel-DNAJuly 3, 2017
  Often a simple way to get user feedback is to show a pop-up message box.  Read on for a tutorial on how to do this.  As an example, this is the result we will get from this blog: The second section of this blog deals with how to handle message boxes during asynchronous operations, asContinue reading “Show Message Boxes with Excel-DNA”
• Excel-DNA Custom Ribbon Cheat SheetApril 25, 2017
  In this blog I’ll give some helpful snippets of code to work with Custom Ribbons in Excel-DNA. I will assume you have already got a project that creates a custom ribbon, and you now want my amazing insight on how to add something that is more elaborate than, say, a button that writes a hard-codedContinue reading “Excel-DNA Custom Ribbon Cheat Sheet”
• My First Custom Excel Ribbon using Excel-DNAFebruary 3, 2017
  In this blog I give a tutorial on getting started with Excel-DNA, a project to build excel add-ins using .NET. By the end you will have a new custom tab in your excel ribbon that contains a button. I will also show you how to debug this excel plugin by running the project directly from Visual Studio
• My First BlogJanuary 29, 2017
  It’s not a long one.  Just to say welcome to my site.  Hope you enjoy coding and can at least stomach rugby, else you may be in for a long ride (actually, I’d advise just surfing off somewhere else if that’s the case)