Mads Kristensen

A blog about everything technology.

2026

6 articles published in 2026

  1. Why I built Home Automation Cookbook, and how I keep it useful

    · 7 min read

    Home Automation Cookbook turns the lessons from years of living with a smart home into platform-neutral recipes. Here is why I created it, how the open-source Jekyll site is organized, and the principles I use to keep every automation useful for the whole household.

  2. Solution Colors: Telling Visual Studio Windows Apart at a Glance

    · 4 min read

    Solution Colors gives each Visual Studio solution a visual identity. Behind the color picker are useful lessons about shell customization, branch-aware settings, and keeping decorative UI from interfering with the IDE.

  3. Lore for Visual Studio: Source control without leaving the IDE

    · 4 min read

    Lore for Visual Studio brings Epic Games' offline-first source control workflow into the IDE and demonstrates how a new source-control provider can integrate with Visual Studio.

  4. Building Max Line Length: Making EditorConfig Formatting Visible in Visual Studio

    · 4 min read

    Max Line Length turns EditorConfig’s max_line_length convention into a live Visual Studio ruler and a safe, opt-in reflow pipeline.

  5. Building Bookmark Studio: bookmarks that belong to the codebase

    · 6 min read

    Bookmark Studio turns Visual Studio bookmarks into named, color-coded, shareable navigation points. Here is how it combines editor taggers, tracking points, a native tool window, command interception, and portable JSON storage.

  6. Building CodeShot: turning Visual Studio editor state into a shareable PNG

    · 6 min read

    Turning a code sample into an image sounds simple until the image needs to look like the code inside Visual Studio. Copying text into a design tool loses editor colors and formatting. Taking a normal screen capture...