The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
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:
AngularJS and VS Code in Singapore
I’m currently in southeast Asia for my world tour. While in Singapore, I had the pleasure to chat with a great group of developers about AngularJS.
I love when I get great questions and the developers at this event were really keyed into the web stack and asked the hard questions about AngularJS (and of course AngularJS 2.0).
As promised, here is the slides and example code:
Announcing the Hello America Road Trip
UPDATE: Registration is open for most cities now. We’re happy to also welcome new guests including David Giard, Joel Cochran, John Petersen, and G. Andrew Duthie! Don’t forget to signup. Only two and a half months to the first event in Seattle with Scott Guthrie!
I’ve been traveling the world with my new wife now for about three hundred days. It’s been amazing but we’re getting ready to come home. I want to share the trip back to Atlanta with all of you!
.NET Fringe is Coming!
As many of you know, I’m not in the country at the moment but if I were, I’d be going to .NET Fringe in Portland, Oregon on April 12-14th. This new conference is all about open source in the .NET space and I and really excited that a conference is focused on it.
I have a couple of small, older .NET open source libraries, but my real facination has been with where the overall community is going. Both Microsoft and the community at large are all going open source and it’s great news for us all I think.
If you’re interested in going, it’s relatively cheap. There is even an option to apply for a free ticket (though I don’t know the qualifications). If you’re a student or unemployed, it’s only $100! You can see all the ticket prices here:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 3 - EF7
NOTE: This post has been updated for changes in Beta 7 and later.
Every web project needs some sort of data framework and ASP.NET 5 is no exception. Like it’s forbearers, ASP.NET 5 uses Entity Framework, but this version of the Entity Framework is different. It’s being re-engineered from the ground up just like the ASP.NET 5 stack.
In this, the third part of my ASP.NET 5 series, I’ll be talking about Entity Framework 7. While you can use older versions of EF or other storage mechanisms (NoSQL, Postgres, etc.), I think it’s an interesting exercise to see what the EF team is thinking in this evolving version of the framework.
Fun Talk Today in Delhi
I’m on the World Tour and this stop is in Delhi, India! While here I had the fun opportunity to give a talk on AngularJS to a great group at Sapient in Delhi, India.
Via Pluralsight and the great Pinal Dave helped organize this event. If I go long enough without giving a talk, I start to get the shakes. The group had great questions which I always like.
As promised, here is the code and slides:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 2 - Startup
In this second post in my six-part series on ASP.NET 5, we’ll take a look at how your ASP.NET 5 applications will be configured upon startup. The startup in this new version of ASP.NET 5 is very different, but hopefully is clearer and easier to debug. At least that’s my impression so far.
If you haven’t read the prior topics, it would probably be helpful to start with the earlier articles. You can see a list of the links to the articles below:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 1 - Getting Started
Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the new ASP.NET 5 (also known as ASP.NET vNext) bits using Visual Studio 2015. I’m trying to make sense of the new changes and how they will affect how I build websites. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned about the new stack.
I’m going to do this by talking through an example website I wrote using the new bits. Do know that we’re still pretty early and Visual Studio 2015 (CTP6 as of this writing) and ASP.NET 5 Beta 3 are both in a state of flux. This is definitely about what’s coming, not what is here so far.
I’ll explain what I’m doing in a series of blog posts and link them all here as I write them. The plan is to write posts about:
ASP.NET 5: First Impressions
I’ve been working on a new web site wholly using the ASP.NET 5 (e.g. vNext, MVC6, etc.) for the past couple of weeks. This means using Visual Studio 2015 Preview and the new project types in ASP.NET 5.
The idea around the site is to be an example of an ASP.NET 5 site using MVC6, EF7, and Visual Studio 2015. It’s not perfect and ASP.NET 5 isn’t ready yet so I expect to continue to fix and remove hacks for quite a while, but it’s been fun to dig into a whole new stack while it’s still getting the kinks worked out. Here are some of my first impressions.
You can see the code as it progresses, I’m I’m not done yet, but I’m sharing the code I’m working on via GitHub here: