My Blog

I can't believe October is almost over! I forgot to post about a couple of videos I made this month.

For some of my personal sites that aren't the dynamic, I've moved them from ASP.NET to static site generation. I find it the right solution for a myriad of smaller websites.

I've been busy with a lot of small projects lately. Among these is to get up to speed with .NET 7 and C# 11. One of the things I've been curious about is the new support for Generic Attributes.

I'm currently redesigning this blog (coming soon) and I've been using TailwindCSS to handle most of the heavy lifting. Being able to use the utility classes to quickly design the new version of the site, has been a ton of fun.

In continuing my discussion of middleware in my Coding Shorts videos, I have a new one that talks about a change to .NET 7 that brings back Output Caching.

I've been logging a long time. My wife and I were talking about it. We realized that it's been over twenty years since my first nascient online attempts.

After my recent video about How ASP.NET Core Middleware Works, I'm continuing to plow through some important pieces of middlware you might not be using.

I've been diving deeper into the client-side development pool. One technology I'm really passionate about is TailwindCSS. In that vein, I've just completed a new course for Pluralsight called "TailwindCSS Fundamentals".

As I continue to make my Coding Shorts videos, I decided to dedicate the next few episodes to ASP.NET Core middleware. I'm going to show off some common middleware that more projects should be using. But before I dive into that, I wanted to make sure everyone understood how middleware actually works.

I've been working on a new Microservice example and I'm writing the client in Vue.js. Due to the nature of the project, I needed to use Nested Routing. I thought this might be a good topic for a Coding Short.

I just got back from four conferences in Europe...and boy are my arms tired. One of the common themes of a lot of talks seemed to be the magic of microservices. I decided to give my 2 cents on the subject in this new rant:

just got out of the DevDay Denmark, a one-day event put together by the incomparable Tibi Covaci at the Copenhagen Microsoft office. Was a great set of talks.

I have a small link shortener that I run for myself. I built it mostly so I could update short links when an URL changes (which bitly didn't let me do). It's been running for a few months and I'm really happy with it. One of the things that I missed was tracking the usage of short links to see how they were being used.

Visual Studio 2022 is frustrating me. Not only does debugging sometimes take way too long, but, for me, the real problem is that the editor is trying to do too much to help me. I just want to be able to type code.

After working with lots of these little JavaScript libraries, sometimes I pine for something simple to create interactivity on websites. In this Coding Short, I investigate Alpine.js to see how it works and where it might be useful:

My recent video elicited several interesting responses. But immediately, I noticed that using ASP.NET Core's cache busting (e.g. asp-append-version) wasn't working quite right for additional StaticFiles middleware. Evidently, I wasn't doing it correctly. Let's walk you through it.

After discussing this topic with a client, I realized that my old method of hosting SPAs in ASP.NET Core didn't handle resources correctly, so I dug in and came up with **yet another** technique. This one is the simpliest and the least intrusive and works better than most. Let me know what you think about it:

I love that this job allows me to learn new stuff every day. In this case, I was building a simple API to use for some upcoming <a href="https://shawnl.ink/psauthor">Pluralsight</a> courses. I wanted to use Minimal APIs to expose some data for an old dataset from <a href="https://data.fivethirtyeight.com">FiveThirtyEight</a> on Bechdel Tests for Films. While I was adding paging, I got confused.

In this new Maintainers video, I talk with Cake Maintainer about how he manages the project and what motivates him.

I've started staying on top of early releases on .NET 7 and C# 11 already. In this new Coding Shorts video, I look at four of the released changes to C# and hopefully you can get a head start on seeing where C# is going.

I'm happy to see that instead, they've adopted Pinia as an alternative. I am not in love with Pinia (as I use reactive objects more often) but for complex scenarios it reminds me of something closer to the Composition API.

I went on the WebRush podcast (with John Papa and Dan Whalin (et al.)) and had a discussion about reactive() and ref() in the Composition API that resulted in this video.

This is an important day for me. As many of you know, I've become a little bit of a film maker over the past few years. I feel like it's been building up to this new film I've spent the last two years making.