The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
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.
As promised, here are links to the slides and demo:
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.
I loved this tweet about our current situation:
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.
Even though I use Visual Studio quite a lot, the brevity of Code allows me to be faster sometimes. Because of this I created a course showing how to use VS Code with ASP.NET Core projects.
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.
I miss project.json, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s about a lot of little helpers that used to make it easier for people coming to the platform, including:
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.
I don’t want to leave you hanging if you have questions, so for now, please ask questions that come up from any of my Pluralsight courses in the comment section of this post. I’ll do my best to answer the questions as quickly as possible.
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).
Wroc# is an interesting event in that they bring in a large number of people (I’m guessing 400 or so) and they have one huge track. Six speakers plus a Q & A Panel for the six speakers and that’s it. I felt very privileged to be picked to be one of the speakers (which included great speakers like Tess Ferrandez, Steven Sanderson, Chris Klug, Maarten Balliauw, and Frans Rosén). It was a great day of .NET and C# content:
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.
I didn’t start tracking users until I added Google Analytics in 2008, but in that time I’ve reached over 1.5m users (who knows how accurate ‘unique users’ are…I’m suspect of this number). But I did just pass 3 million page views. I’m hoping most of those views helped people just a little.
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.
So far, it only has a handful of snippets that my 4am brain knew I wanted:
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.
My goal with replacing Angular 2 was to remove a lot of the complexity. Getting Angular 2 up and running requires a lot of moving parts. By removing Angular 2 I was able to eliminate a lot of pieces of the build. These pieces were making my builds on Azure App Services brittle so it had to go.