.NET Developer Days Poland Wrap-up
Had a great week here in Warsaw! Got to see some great sights and great developers!
Thanks to the great team behind .NET Developer Days! Great group of attendees that asked some great questions.
Intellisense in ASP.NET Core Projects That Use NPM?
I've been advocating using NPM for a client-side package manager in the last few months since Bower support has been depreciated. And while this works pretty well (using Scott Allen's UseNodeModules middlware) to allow you to just point at the NPM folder.
Of course, for production, this isn't a great solution. I've been showing people to use Gulp or WebPack to copy only the files you need in production. But for development, there is a problem: Intellisense.
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.
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.
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.
Learning Web Development with Pluralsight
As many of you know, I'm a Pluralsight author and I've been writing courses for the site for a long time now. I have over twenty courses to my name. While my ASP.NET Core courses get a lot of attention, I've been trying to help people get started in general web development through my courses.
To this end, I wanted to answer the question I get a lot of times about how someone would transition into web development from desktop or other programming (or even completely new to the field). This post's purpose is to help people see what Pluralsight courses (mine and others) would be a good primer into web development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deploying ASP.NET Core RC1 to Azure App Services
As you can see, I recently updated this blog. I wrote the new blog using ASP.NET Core RC1 (as related technologies) so when time came to deploy it, I had some issues.
At the time I thought it was Azure, but after testing with an empty project that worked, I figured it was probably something I did. In this post, I’ll talk about what I did to get it to work in Azure Websites.
Using Cache in ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC1
When I created my blog in ASP.NET Core, I forgot about one feature that I used to help out some other Pluralsight authors by creating a quick top 100 list of courses. Because Pluralsight doesn’t really expose that data as an API, I didn’t want to hammer their service, so I had been using a memory cache to do it.
But when I moved the code over, I realized that the old, reliable Cache object was missing. Luckily I found it and like much of ASP.NET Core, adding it was simple and consistent. Let me show you.
The Week at DEVIntersection
I want to thank all the great attendees I met at this week’s DEVIntersection (Fall 2015) conference in Vegas! Richard Campbell and company put on a great show!
I had the opportunity to do three talks and two of them went well (if you were at my Bootstrap talk, you know what I’m talking about). In any case, I wanted to share the slide and code with the attendees so here it is:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 4 - MVC 6
I had planned on finishing these a long time ago, but working on my Pluralsight course about ASP.NET 5 distracted me. Sorry about that.
If you’ve been doing web development in .NET, you probably have at least a passing experience with ASP.NET’s MVC framework. At it’s core, it’s a common way to build and architect web applications. The new stack is built on the same metaphors from the older versions. If you’ve been using MVC before, you won’t be lost and some of the additions are welcome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Visual Studio and WebStorm: Am I Mad?
I might be. In many of the projects I help with we have to handle back-end and front-end coding for web projects. This means I need the best in breed in tools no matter where I’m writing code.
In many cases this is Visual Studio. I love this tool and have for years. While it’s not without it’s own foibles, it does most things really well. But not everything.
My New Course: WebStorm Fundamentals
Last week my seventeenth course for Pluralsight! I love building content for Pluralsight and it allows me to teach technologies that I am utilizing in my own life. This new course is no different.
The new course is all about using WebStorm 9 to build web applications. The course was built using the WebStorm 9 EAP so I was able to cover new features as well as the basics.
It Is Too Soon to Panic on AngularJS 2.0
So AngularJS team finally is talking more publically about what they’re trying to do. At the ngEurope conference last week, they talked very opening about their new strategy for AngularJS 2.0 and it has a lot of people freaked out. Sounds a lot like some reaction to Silverlight in fact.
I’m seeing a flood of hate on the AngularJS team at the moment. I am not sure it is justified. Here’s why:
Single Page Applications? Bah Humbug!
I know that the title of this post may be a bit of link bait, sorry about that. But having been in this business quite a while now, I am noticing a trend. A trend that worries me.
The Single Page Application (or SPA) moniker is one I’ve always disliked (as you’d know if you follow me on Twitter). But it’s not the technology I have a problem with, it’s the moniker and the implications of the moniker.
Time Zones and Servers
I am getting married and that means I get a bunch of development tasks to do for the wedding planning. I guess it’s my own fault, I did propose with an app.
One of the tasks I had to do was create a new page on my wedding site for the day of the wedding to include things like directions and parking. Pretty simple HTML stuff, but one thing I wanted to be sure of was to only show the page on the day of the wedding. This should be easy, but the time zone of the server has kicked my ass before.
My Courses
