The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Seeding Related Entities in EF Core 2.1's HasData()
If you didn't notice, Entity Framework Core 2.1 has a new way to support seeding your databases with a method called HasData. Julie Lerman has a great new Data Points column in MSDN that explains how a lot of it works.
Go read that article first. It really covers the basics. Unfortunately, for my use, her article missed a tiny detail that I think is useful. But let's start with a brief overview of how HasData works.
In Entity Framework before .NET Core, entity framework had a way to create seed data but that method had a number of issues so they decided not to bring it over to Entity Framework Core. Now that we're into version 2.1 of Entity Framework Core, they wanted to allow for a way to seed the data with certain types of data.
Avoid Lazy Loading in ASP.NET
I know I am not going to make everyone happy with this post. I've been hoping to not have to make this post, but Entity Framework Core has finally added support for Lazy Loading, so it's time.
This problem is not new. Entity Framework (not Core) also has this problem. But it's far easier to accidentally do this in that version. Luckily, Entity Framework Core has made it harder to inadvertently turn it on. Let's see what's wrong with Lazy Loading in Web Apps.
Just to make sure were talking about the same things, I'll explain how Lazy Loading works.
Atlanta Code Camp 2018 Call for Speakers
The Atlanta Code Camp is coming again on September 15th! This annual event brings some of the best speakers from around the country! Be one of them.
The Atlanta Code Camp call for speakers is open until August 20th. Sign up even if you have never had a chance to speak before. Topics covered will include:
You can submit your talks here:
The Reports of the Death of JavaScript are Greatly Exaggerated
Not John BoltonThe notorious quip by Mark Twain came to mind today as I was reviewing comments to my recent blog post about Blazor, a lot of the comments talked about WebAssembly being the death of JavaScript.
The fact is that we've all been here before. In fact, we've been here many times. And I, for one, don't want to simply see WebAssembly as something to replace JavaScript. Here are my thoughts.
So I've been in software development for over thirty years (I know, i'm old). And my experience with web development started about twenty years ago. So I've seen a lot of solutions to avoiding client-side development with Scripting Languages come and go. Here's a short list:
Who is Blazor for Exactly?
In case you haven't been following the news about WebAssembly (e.g. WASM), it's a new way to build something akin to bytecode for the browser. The latest versions of most browsers now support it including Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Microsoft has built an experimental release of something called Blazor that builds web projects in WebAssembly so you can write all your code in C#. But after playing with one of the builds, I'm starting to think about who this really is for. Let's delve into what WebAssembly is and then how Blazor works to explain what I think.
There are a plethora of good descriptions of WebAssembly on the web, but I'll try and summarize it in practical terms. Essentially, it's a binary format for code in the browser. The expectation is that this code should run much faster than traditional JavaScript. This gives the browser several key benefits:
Music City Code 2018
Just got home from Music City Code conference had a great time catching up with attendees and other speakers. If you haven't made it to this great Nashville event before, plan for next year. It's well worth it.
As promised, here are the slides and code from my talks. I did talks on "Enhancing Web Pages with VueJS: When You Don't Need a full SPA" and "Versioning APIs with ASP.NET Core 2.1". Here you go:
Vue and ASP.NET Core - A New Course
In case you haven't been following on Twitter, you might not know that I've been working on a Vue course for a couple of months now. This particular course is now available as an Early Access model I'm trying out.
Instead of waiting and releasing the whole course, I'm publishing the course module-by-module. The idea is that Early Access gives you access to each module as I finish them.
This course is my first try at this. Because Early Access means students will be something like the Beta testers for the course, I can release the course at a discount. So far I've been able to release the first six modules and I'm pretty happy with how the course is coming along.
Are your Node-Based Tools Failing in Visual Studio?
Since I do a lot of web development and teach web dev on the Microsoft platform, I spend a lot of time in tools that are node-based. If you don't know already, gulp, grunt, webpack, etc. all use node to run themselves.
Because of this, Visual Studio tries to be a good guy and pre-installs Node with Visual Studio. When you use some of these tools in Visual Studio, they just work. No more having to tell dev's to go install something to get them to work.
Of course, keeping that version up to date is a bit of a nightmare. I ran into yesterday and wasted several hours of my life. Let me tell you the story:
Help Me Finish 'Hello World: The Film'
As I expect most of you already know, I'm making a documentary film about software developers called "Hello World: The Film". I've started a crowd funding campaign to help me finish the film.
If you're a software developer or just know one, you might be interested in helping me make this film a reality. The film delves into the mind of software developers and the history of the business.
You can contribute here:
Beyond Bower Webcast
Thanks to everyone who came to my webcast today! As many of you know, Bower is depreciated so I've been looking at the different ways to move to other solutions.
In the webcast (which will be streamable soon), I discuss using NPM, Yarn, LibMan (an upcoming tool for Visual Studio), and Gulp to get and package your client-side assets.
You can get the code I showed on Github: