The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
ASP.NET Core 2.0 and the End of Bower
Bower is still being maintained, but they're recommending that people move their projects to Yarn and Webpack. As you may not know, I'm on a sort of campaign to avoid the complexity of something like Webpack until you really need it.
In addition, some libraries aren't supported by Bower (e.g. Angular 2-5) so I wanted to finally end my use of two package managers when I needed Angular. My decision has been to use NPM instead of Bower since that's where Angular lives at and is a huge ecosystem thanks to node.
UPDATE: Seems that Yarn isn't tied to Webpack like I thought. Sorry for the confusion. I've removed that from the article and will have a new article on Yarn soon.
Hello World: The Film - Kickstarter
If any of my readers are familiar with my podcast, you'll know I love talking to developers. I want to understand why we do we what we do and how that started in their lives.
To this end, I've decided to make a documentary film about developers. I have several goals for the film, but the over-arching theme is to help people understand the role of code and coders in their daily lives.
I've been to a myriad of parties in my life and when asked, I often, sheepishly, say "I'm into computers". But that's not a sufficient answer. It's enough for many people to shrug it off and stop asking questions, but I think if most people got a sense of what we do, they'd find it interesting. That's where the idea for "Hello World: The Film" came from.
Visual Studio Field Refactoring Trick
I've been using a new trick on my courses as of late that I've been getting some questions about. I figured I'd just blog about it to share the trick.
The trick in question is taking a constructor parameter and storing it in a class field. Most of it is just refactoring, but there is a way to customize what it looks like.
I like to use factoring to build up my code as I write. I'm not a Resharper guy, but i'll use it as much as I can. I just don't like to re-setup Resharper on every install. I'm basically lazy.
Learning Web Development with Pluralsight
As many of you know, I'm a Pluralsight author and I've been writing courses for the site for a long time now. I have over twenty courses to my name. While my ASP.NET Core courses get a lot of attention, I've been trying to help people get started in general web development through my courses.
To this end, I wanted to answer the question I get a lot of times about how someone would transition into web development from desktop or other programming (or even completely new to the field). This post's purpose is to help people see what Pluralsight courses (mine and others) would be a good primer into web development.
While this isn't a Pluralsight learning path, it's what I suggest to get started with web development on the Microsoft stack (using open source tools and technologies).
Using Azure Storage in ASP.NET Core
This blog has existed for 15 years now and I've moved it from server to server, service to service, in many forms over the years. As I moved servers, one of my biggest pains was copying all the images and downloads from server to server.
My site code took up about 1% of the space, and all those embedded images and downloads took a majority of the space. I was sick of it, especially on deploying the site (or saving the site in Git), so I decided to switch to storing it in Azure Storage (or AWS if you prefer).
So when I wrote my .NET Core version of the blog, I decided to bite the bullet and start storing them there. But I wanted to enable it directly from Blog authoring. I'm using my version of Metalog API middleware I wrote to do this (see more about that at Github). But I needed a small service to actually support saving new images to the storage service.
Two AuthorizationSchemes in ASP.NET Core 2
When ASP.NET Core 2 shipped the early previews, I knew one large change was going to be the Identity subsystem. The Identity for ASP.NET Core 1 worked ok, but the setup was very confusing with identical configuration is more than one place.
I’m happy to say that in ASP.NET Core 2 it’s much better. Implementing JWT Tokens for APIs was more confusing than I liked back when I wrote my Implementing an API in ASP.NET Core course for Pluralsight. I was hoping that it changed to simplify the way it works.
Now that I’m re-writing my ASP.NET Core End-to-End course for Pluralsight, I wanted to be able to both Cookies and JWT without having to split the projects. While this should work in ASP.NET Core 1, I couldn’t figure it out.
ASP.NET Core 2.0 Released
I’m very excited that the v2 of ASP.NET Core is now released. Married with Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (or VS Core), it is now a maturing platform.
I really like what the team has been doing since the release of 1.0. They seem to really have thought about the pain points of the initial versions and worked to eliminate as many as they could.
Of course v1.x was a bumpy time. The migration from project.json to MSBuild was a painful one, but we’re past that now. You can get it now from the dot.net website:
Kansas City Developers Conference
So KCDC is over for another year. This was my first year at the event and the organizers made me so welcome. Highly recommended!
I had the opportunity to teach both VueJS and Visual Studio Code for the attendees. As promised, here is the code and the slides from the event!
Introduction to VueJS
Scenic City Summit 2017
Just got back from Chattanooga, TN for Scenic City Summit. I got to do two talks there and had some great audiences and questions.
Was great to catch up with some of the best speakers in the southeast at the event. I hope the attendees enjoyed it as much as I did.
As promised, here are the slides and the code from my two talks:
My Talk at Birmingham .NET User Meetup
I had the opportunity to present ASP.NET Core 2.0 to a great group in Birmingham, AL tonight. The attendees were almost as good as the BBQ!
Doing a talk on a preview (ASP.NET Core 2.0) on top of another preview (VS 2017 Preview) is always risky, but it went well. Lots of great questions and hopefully I convinced some of the attendees to give it a try.
As promised, I wanted to share the slides and code: