The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Angular v. React v. Aurelia v. et al.
When I announced my upcoming course, I had a lot of people ask me about what I thought of X framework versus Angular (which I’m covering in the course). I feel like I have to say something.
Before I bestow my blessing, let’s talk about the fundamental problem of frameworks in general. They can be a boon or a bust and many developers have been hurt by a selection of a specific framework in the past. I know I’m being asked so that some devs can go to their architect to confirm their particular positions. I’m hoping to avoid that in this post, but I doubt it will work.
This selection of a framework isn’t new. It’s ancient in fact. I had to battle the same problem in my past; whether it was Oracle v. SQL Server in my ADOGuy days, MVVMLight vs ever other MVVM library in Silverlight, or even Mongo v. every other NoSQL Store. The argument is the same:
New ASPNET5 Course Coming
I’m diligently working towards my new Pluralsight course and I am very excited about it. The new course is an end-to-end building of a web app using ASP.NET 5, MVC6, Entity Framework 7, Angular 1.4, and Bootstrap 3.x.
This course is a bit different than other courses I’ve done because we’re releasing it before the RTM of ASP.NET 5. Because of this, I wanted to let my students know what to expect.
The course will build a web app from an empty ASP.NET 5 project through to a deployed app. This mirrors my ASP.NET MVC5 course from a couple of years ago, but is written with the new stack. The course will build a whole new project as well. This time, you’ll be building a tool for trip planning called “The World”.
Atlanta Code Camp Call for Speakers is Open
We’re excited to announce that the 10th Annual Atlanta Code Camp is coming this fall on October 24th, 2015! We’re holding it at Kennesaw State University in Marietta, Georgia.
Whether you’re a veteran of technical talks or itching to get your feet wet with your first session, you should submit your ideas to the code camp. We like to have a mix of venerable and new speakers.
Registration for the event will open soon, but the Call for Speakers is now open at:
Windows Phone, Surface, and Fanboydom
I admit it, I don’t know if that last word in the title is real, but anyway. I’ve used a Windows Phone since betas of Windows Phone 7. Like some of you I have the question of whether to believe the new Microsoft’s lukewarm support for the platform. Will Win10 be the savior of the platform or final coffin nail? I don’t have an answer to that.
I like to think that all that time has given me perspective, but I am not sure that’s true. I liken myself to a detached observer, but the reality is that I own a Windows Phone, a Windows Laptop, an Xbox One (and 360 before it), a Microsoft Band, and I even have a Spot Watch somewhere in a box. Does that make me a fanboy? I hope not, but certainly not a detached observer with a honest perspective.
Where does that leave me? That’s for my readers to judge. I am sure it’s somewhere in the middle but certainly leaning towards being a Microsoft fanboy.
Mapping Between Entities and View Models
As many of you know, my recent course on Pluralsight dealt with Best Practices in ASP.NET: Entities, Validation and View Models. As I’ve worked with clients, there seem to be a non-ending list of ways to deal with data in ASP.NET.
One of the topics that I am passionate about as it relates to the course is how to manage the Model to Entity relationship. While being pragmatic is important, I still believe that there are many situations where you want a separate Model for a view (server or client-side) instead of just using the Entities that you’re storing data with.
The challenge here is how to do the mapping between the entities and models without having to churn out tons of boilerplate. Luckily, there are a number of solutions including AutoMapper.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta4 to Beta5
For my upcoming course, I have a decent sized example that I’ll be teaching from. In the process of watching ASP.NET 5 go through the sprints, I have to upgrade the project at every step. I feel at some point I should be getting better at dealing with the sprints, but not yet ; )
Here is a short post that includes the different things I had to deal with in upgrading the project. It’s not just the ASP.NET 5 update, but also EF7 and a couple of small details.
First, I followed these instructions I found as an answer to an upgrade problem on SO. It got me close:
Back in the Swing of It
It’s been a tough couple of months here at Wildermuth central. I’m finally feeling good enough to get back on my proverbial feet. The hair is longer, the beard grayer, and hopefully a little more wise.
You should hear a lot more of me now that I’m back home in Atlanta. I have a lot of web development experience to share with the blog. I hope you will enjoy what is coming.
In the last two months a lot of chaos has taken hold including:
My Entities, Validation and View Models Course
A few weeks back, I released a new course on Pluralsight. This new course talks through what I consider “Best Practices” (though there are no absolutes) for ASP.NET Entities, View Models, and Validation.
I was tremendously pleased to find it made it into the top ten courses for a few days. It seems to be resonating with some students and that makes me really happy. If you’re writing ASP.NET code, this course could make your job easier!
The course covers:
We're Coming Home!
So, it’s over. After a year on the road I am coming home. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my decision. While visiting friends in Thailand, I fell through a footbridge and broke my shoulder. With surgery and physical therapy coming we decided it will be easier in Atlanta than in Bangkok.
For me the real shame is that we have to cancel the Hello America Road Trip. I was really looking forward to crossing the country and meeting some great developers. Don’t worry we’ll reschedule it.
The last year has been an amazing experience. We had always planned on the trip lasting a year. Ironically, the accident happened one year and one day into the trip. Perhaps it was the universe telling me to get back home.
How'd You Build That Map?
When I started the Wilder World Tour, I built a simple map so my Mom could know where I was during the trip. I thought others might be interested too.
I’d been meaning to find an extra day or two to wrap this all in a little wrapper and share it. I finally found time the last couple of days. The result is travelMap, a library that allows you to build your own travel maps including showing current location, lines between locations, and popup information about each stop.
Find the project on GitHub and use it, share it, fork it: