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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Building a .NET Core Configuration Source
As I've been teaching ASP.NET Core for a while now, some things I've been saying I've taken on faith. One of these was that building a Configuration Source (a provider that can read configuration and feed it into the configuration system) is fairly easy.
With a break in building my Vue course, I was curious so I decided to build a configuration source that I hope no one uses. It is a configuration source that reads the AppSettings in a web.config file. This is a thought exercise, not a recommendation.
Using JwtBearer Authentication in an API-only ASP.NET Core Project
In my Pluralsight courses1 on ASP.NET Core, I show how to use JWT Tokens to secure your API. In building a new example for my upcoming Vue.js course, I decided to only use JWT (not cookies and JWT like many of my examples are).
But I kept getting redirects on failure to call an API made me realize that I wasn't sure how to make JWT the only provider. After some fiddling I figured it out. This blog post is mostly to remind me of how to do it.
Using UseStaticFiles with NPM Client Dependencies - Talk Me Out of It
Ok, please tell me how stupid this is. It's apt to be pretty stupid but I have a point to it. I'm trying to separate the ideas of prototyping quickly from preparing for production.
I've been using Bower to do examples of client-side dependencies. Bower is depreciated so for new dev, I don't want to recommend it (and VS2017 has removed it too). Bower is clean as you don't have to introduce a bunch of ideas like gulp or npm scripts to get someone with a working example quickly (Bower's .rc file let's you tell it where to put the dependencies). I want to do the same thing with NPM.
My Courses
| Vue.js by Example (Early Access Now Available) |
| Bootstrap 4 by Example (Just Released) |
| Intro to Font Awesome 5 (Free Course) |
