New Training Options at WilderMinds
I know that some people learn better in-person than online, so starting next month I’ll be back to offering in-person courses. These includes some of the same topics as my popular Pluralsight course, as well as topics that are not covered there.
These in-person training courses can be customized for your company’s particular needs and skill level of students. Feel free to take a look at my company’s website for more details.
DevSum 2017
I had the pleasure of being asked to come to Stockholm to attend the DevSum 2017 conference. While my talk was the last of the day on the last day of the conference, I still was able to meet a bunch of great developers who stayed long enough to see my talk on Hololens.
As usual, the demo tanked, but I was able to save face by showing the after version of the demo. Unity can be a little headstrong and getting the settings to work with Hololens mis risky in front of an audience, but we got some good questions about how you’d use Hololens.
Vue + TypeScript Without a Module Bundler
I’ve been feeling kind of old school lately. I’ve been pining for just writing client-side code and watching it work. That’s not the world that we’re in these days.
Writing web apps has become complicated. Transpilation has made some thing really awesome, but it also has complicated the field. Webpack, Browserify, Babel and even TypeScript have all make our lives easier and awful at the same time.
Using VS Code and ASP.NET Core?
Developers are an odd beast. Some developers love a big IDE and lots of automation to help them create great solutions.
The other type of developer, wants to write code quickly and spends a lot of time at the command-line. Luckily, Microsoft supports both types of developer.
Techorama 2017
I had the pleasure of being invited to Techorama in Antwerp, Belgium this year. As usual, Gil and the team had a great event with over 1,500 attendees.
I love this conference because the attendees are so plugged in and I get great questions every time I do a talk there. I want to thank everyone for coming to see me talk on ASP.NET Core even though I had lost my voice. We muscled through though and hopefully some people are digging in deeper with it now.
Why is ASP.NET Core Development So Much Harder in VS2017?
As most of you know, I’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET Core for quite a while and I’ve been pretty happy with the functionality.
But now that we’re in ASP.NET Core 1.1 (I know 2.0 is in preview, but I’m sticking with 1.1 for this discussion) and Visual Studio 2017, it feel a lot harder than it should be.
Questions for My Pluralsight Courses
For any of the students who are taking my courses, thanks for all your support. I really appreciate it.
Normally the Discussion tab on my courses would be the place to ask questions about the course, but right now it’s impossible. Due to a change from Livefyre, all discussion is locked temporarily on all courses at Pluralsight.
Wroc# Wrap-Up
The great organizers of Wrocsharp invited us to come to Poland and present at an unusual conference. I had a great time and everyone was just lovely to me and my wife!
Wroclaw Poland (not pronounced anything like you’re thinking) is a lovely little city that has an interesting history. We enjoyed chasing down some of the hundred or so dwarves that line the front of shops and churches (seen to the right – yes, that’s a dwarf using a tiny ATM).
Time Flies: Fifteen years of Blogging
The first blog post I wrote was on April 10th, 2002. That means I’m coming up on fifteen years of blogging.
A lot has changed both personally and in our industry in that amount of time. I’m going to look back in wonder at the last fifteen years if I can.
ASP.NET Core Snippets for Visual Studio Code
I’m currently creating a new course on how to use Visual Studio Code with ASP.NET Core. While I rely on yeoman for project scaffolding and some file scaffolding, I wanted to get some of the snippets I’ve grown used to having in the full Visual Studio.
I found a project called ASP.NET Core Snippets to my excitement, but it only had snippets for some of the main files in your project. Not action snippets or razor snippets. So at 4am last night I wrote a Visual Studio Code extension to add some of these snippets.
Why I Moved to Vue.js from Angular 2
I know I’m going to upset some people, but hang in and read the whole article…really. In updating my blog recently, one of the changes I wanted to make was to update my use of the JavaScript framework I used for the contact page.
When I built this blog, I wanted to get comfortable with Angular 2. I shoehorned Angular 2 into the contact page as an excuse to use it. Never a good decision.
Updating My Blog to Visual Studio 2017 and .csproj
Now that the ASP.NET Core tooling changes are finally here, I decided to update my blog to the new bits. Goodbye project.json and hello .csproj.
Finding the project after upgrading it, I had to look for those points of contact I had gotten comfortable using. The upgrade wasn’t painful (look back at those Beta 7-Beta 8 upgrades for that story), but knowing where they moved your cheese is important. Hopefully this post helps you with the same issues.
New Course on Building an API with ASP.NET Core
Are you new to ASP.NET Core? Maybe you’re building an API for your SPA, mobile app, or just your web app. I recently released a new Pluralsight course that can help you.
This new, six-hour, course covers the basics of building REST APIs with ASP.NET Core. Whether you’re just exposing your data via REST, or building microservices, this new course should have you covered.
Speeding up Azure App Service Builds
I run this blog and other sites on Azure App Services (used to be called Websites). As you might know all that code is open source on GitHub and I use that code to deploy directly to Azure.
I use the GitHub deployment that Azure offers so that every time I push a change to my master branch, it creates a new deployment for me. It's been pretty great, except...the deployment is pretty slow. Normally the speed of this deployment wouldn't matter a lot, except of course when I push a bug out to 'live'. Then the speed really matters.
Updating WilderBlog to ASPNETCore 1.1
I upgraded my WilderBlog project to ASP.NET Core 1.1 today. I had planned on writing a big blog post about how to accomplish it, but I was surprised instead by how uneventful the process was.
Some of my students were using ASP.NET Core 1.1 in their walk through using my Pluralsight course and I was unsure of how much of a problem that was going to be, but so far no problems really.
My First ScriptCS
I’ve known Glenn Block for a long time now and I’ve heard about the ScriptCS project he’s worked on for a long time. I’ve never had time to dig in until now.
For the uninitiated, ScriptCS is a scriptable environment that uses .NET and C# for it’s platform. It makes writing simple scripts easier if you know C# already. It has support in several different editors, but I’ll talk about how I used it with Visual Studio Code since that’s my new favorite toy.
Looking for the Goldilocks of Web Frameworks
So I’ve been on a mission of sorts…I’m looking for the right size framework for some of my web development. I know what you’re saying, “Aren’t you suggesting Angular2 for everything”? No, no I’m not.
I just made a bunch of you excited. You React, Aurelia, and Ember enthusiasts and now probably foaming at the lips ready to tell me to use one of your frameworks! Hold off for now. Let’s talk about it.
Boston Code Camp 2016
I had the good fortune of being picked to speak at the Boston Code Camp for their winter event. As some of you know I used to live in Boston and it was a fun few days of reminicence.
The talk that got picked was ASP.NET Core Logging. As I've discussed on this blog, I'm a fan of how the logging is implemented.
Testing SSL in ASP.NET Core
When building my ASP.NET Core apps, I usually enable the RequireSSL filter in production environments. But I’ve never went through getting it to work on my dev box as I thought it was harder than it actually was.
Effectively to get SSL running, I thought I needed to get involved in creating and handling certificates. Not really true.
What I Learned Building with ASP.NET Core: Part 1 - Routing
I’ve been digging into ASP.NET Core for quite a while now (from the early betas through the current release). Recently I re-wrote the Atlanta Code Camp website using ASP.NET Core.
Through that process I’ve learned some new lessons about ASP.NET Core and this series of blog posts is going to talk about those lessons. I have no idea how many parts it will have, but I’ll post all that I’ve learned in building a site with real users ; )
ASP.NET Core Dependency Injection
I’ve been building some ASP.NET Core apps as of late and had to dig into how Dependency Injection works there. After talking with Julie Lerman a bit on Twitter about it, I realized that there might be some confusing things about how it works in ASP.NET Core, so I’m hoping I can add some clarity in this post.
One thing I like about ASP.NET Core is that since it is a new platform, I’m learning something new all the time. When I suggested to Julie to use DI in her example database seeder, but of course there were things I was missing and my suggestion would actually just leak a context object. Lets look at some of the default dependency injection in ASP.NET Core to see how it is supposed to work.
NDC Sydney was Awesome!
We just left Sydney after a great few days of the NDC Sydney conference. Saw some very cool talks about ASP.NET Core and Angular2!
Of particular interest was a talk by Steven Sanderson on JavaScript services for ASP.NET Core (e.g. cool things to do with Angular2, React and Node). When the recording is done, you should totally go see it!
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.
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.
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.
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