The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Is Angular2 Too Full of Ceremony?
I know this was a “click-bait” post name, but so be it. I’ve been doing some small Angular2 in a recent project (rebuilding the new Atlanta Code Camp website) and I’ve been frustrated with the amount of ceremony. But I may be misunderstanding Angular2 so bear with me.
The problem for me is in the idea of SPA in general. SPA seems to imply monolithic apps but written in client-side web code. For a single, large scale application, Angular2 seems like it is just right…but that’s not what I do.
I want client-side frameworks to fill in the holes for when a website needs rich user interaction. Making every part of a page some sub-element in a huge SPA makes as little sense as the old monolithic Visual Basic 3.0 apps that used to be the norm.
My ASP.NET Core Course Has Been Updated to RTM
I’m really excited to announce that my popular Pluralsight course on ASP.NET Core has been updated to RTM. It’s been a long slog to update and I apologize for the delay but it’s ready now.
The course is so different from the earlier builds, that we’ve decided to retire the older course and create a complete fresh course. Over 60% of the videos had to be updated and the entire set of example code had to be changed too.
Luckily we’ve reached the RTM milestone so that we can finally depend on the APIs not being changed. The ASP.NET Core tooling is only at Preview 2 so we will be making minor changes to the course as the tooling is updated.
Virtual Reality Whitman's Sampler
When I was a kid, I had the dream of building an immersive ‘video’ game. I thought the magic was going to be holography. My idea was a holographic skiing game. Of course holographic tech didn’t mature like I hoped it would.
So now that VR is having it’s resurgence, it’s made me think back to those days of old. In this post, I’d like to talk about the different devices I’ve had.
I have to admit, I got an Oculus DK2 not to try and write some software for it. Instead I was obsessed with Elite Dangerous and being able to fly around the galaxy in three dimensions was too enticing. The Oculus DK2 was a great device. It opened my eyes that VR has finally landed and was real.
Converting ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 to RTM Bits
If you’re like me, you’ve changed your projects from RC1 to RC2 only to find out that the RTM was coming quickly. Well we are here so we need some steps to convert projects.
Like other posts, I am going to list all the changes I found but there are likely more that I didn’t run into. Feel free to use the comment system to add more as you like!
Rename all the “1.0.0-rc2-final” references to just “1.0.0”
ASP.NET Core 1.0 Released!
This day has been a long time coming but I want to congratulate the team at Microsoft for delivering the first version of ASP.NET Core! I’m very excited to start working with the bits on real projects.
If you haven’t had a chance to look at play with ASP.NET Core, it’s time! For the ASP.NET MVC and Web API users, the transition is pretty quick, but if you’re coming from ASP.NET Web Forms or another technology, there is a learning curve.
My sense of it is that this is a new platform, not a new development model. You are closer to the metal without having to give up the productivity of the ASP.NET you’ve always loved (and maybe hated a little). This is a mature, open source, cross platform, and fast ASP.NET. It’s a new day in Microsoft’s web platform and it’s time to be a part of it.
Win a T-Shirt from the Hello World Road Trip
We got home and have extra shirts. Love to give them away. Sign up for our mailing list and we’ll pick winners to get one of our limited edition T-Shirts.
The shirts come in S, M, L, XL and 2XL but limited quantities of each. Please sign up below if you want win a shirt. We will be mailing them out by the end of July. Please note that we can only mail them to the United States and Canada.
You can sign up here:
Thanks for the Great Road Trip!
We’re home. It’s a fantastic feeling, but we had a great time. I wanted to take some time to thank all the great attendees, guests and helpers that made this a great trip. We got some great podcasts and hopefully encouraged a lot of people to try out ASP.NET Core!
We took a lot of pictures and you can see some of them by clicking on the mosaic to the right!
Some statistics of the trip:
Converting an ASP.NET Core RC1 Project to RC2
With the release of ASP.NET Core RC2, Microsoft hit a major milestone. But
this change isn’t a trivial one. It’s a big change.
Since I’m updating my Pluralsight course on ASP.NET Core, I wanted to get a list of changes for the new version. I figured I’d share all the changes I could find converting a stock RC1 project to a RC2 one. It’s a big list, but hopefully manageable. Please share in comments and changes I missed so others can be helped!
First, change the framework to the new naming style. For dxcore use:
Getting Ready for ASP.NET Core RC2
I’m starting to play with the Preview of RC2 (nightly builds). It’s not time to do it for most people, but I’m trying to prepare for the update to my ASP.NET Core RC1 course on Pluralsight.
I have a couple of small library projects that I created when I build the new website. Since they are both pretty small and have xUnit testing, I thought it might be a good place to start.
I started by branching the projects so that I could merge them after RC2 shipped. The one I’ll walk you through is the MetaWeblog project. This is a small middleware for ASP.NET Core to support the Meta Weblog API to support Windows Live Writer (and other tools) for writing your blog items. You can see the comparison between the master and the RC2 branch here:
The Future of project.json in ASP.NET Core
If you’re not paying attention to Twitter, the ASP.NET Standup or the Github repositories, you might be missing a big change coming to ASP.NET Core. Now is time to add your opinion so that Microsoft can make the right move.
I suggest you read up on the change and make your voice heard if you have an opinion. My opinion is pretty clearly stated in the GitHub discussion so I won’t bother to repeat it here, but I’m asking you to get involved.
Microsoft has decided after the RTM of the ASP.NET Core framework to phase out project.json and use MSBuild for build data. They’ve not decided whether to keep the NuGet dependencies in a pared down project.json (maybe renamed to nuget.json) or whether to just allow for a command-line action like “nuget install dependency --save” to mirror what other package managers do.