Kicking Off The Road Trip!
It’s almost time to hit the road again and I am very excited! I’m headed across North America (with a dash of Europe) over twenty-five cities this spring.
During each stop of the road trip, I’m recording an episode of the Hello World Podcast, then doing an hour talk about ASP.NET 5 ASP.NET 1.0 Core!
ASP.NET 5 Webinar
I had a great time today talking about ASP.NET 5 on a Pluralsight webinar. Over 1,000 people were able to attend. Thank you all for tuning in!
The webinar showed the very basics of what ASP.NET 5 is and why it exists. I had fun answering all the questions and wish we had time to answer more.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta 8 to RC1
UPDATED: Missed fixes.
It’s that time again. ASP.NET 5 has a new release and this one has a go-live license! As announced today, the RC1 is available and a new RC2 is coming in the future.
ASP.NET 5 and Bower
As most of you already know, I have a new course on ASP.NET 5. I’ve just released a teaser video that shows how the Bower.json editor in Visual Studio works.
The course was recently updated to use the ASP.NET Beta 8 bits. I am looking forward to the next update of ASP.NET and expect to continue to update the course all the way through the RTM.
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:
Upgrading from ASP.NET 5 Beta 7 to Beta 8
If you’ve been following along, you know by now that I’m investing my time into learning ASP.NET 5. Now that the ASP.NET team have released a new version, let me help you move your code to the new version.
The update this time includes some simple package changes but also some major API changes. I am sure I can’t cover them all here, but hopefully I’ll help you avoid the major ones.
New Course on ASP.NET 5!
If you read my blog, you probably already know how excited I am about ASP.NET 5. To dovetail with that, I’ve created a nine-hour course on Pluralsight that covers this brand-new technology from Redmond.
This new course is similar to my end-to-end course on ASP.NET 4/MVC5 that I released a couple of years ago. The goal of the course is to teach you all the concepts while helping you build a simple web app.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 5 - The API
The more I work with ASP.NET 5, the more it looks and feels like the old ASP.NET stack except for the hosting. That’s a good thing in most cases, but writing the API that changes.
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.
ASP.NET 5 Identity and REST APIs
As I’ve been digging into building apps with ASP.NET 5, I’ve had to get used to some of the new metaphors. Some of these make sense (especially if you’ve used Node before), but some are brand new to me. One of these metaphors I ran into was the idea of Identity notifications.
The problem I was running into was one I thought many people would run into: using Identity (e.g. authentication/authorization) with REST APIs. Here is the scenario:
Angular v. React v. Aurelia v. et al.
When I announced my upcoming course, I had a lot of people ask me about what I thought of X framework versus Angular (which I’m covering in the course). I feel like I have to say something.
Before I bestow my blessing, let’s talk about the fundamental problem of frameworks in general. They can be a boon or a bust and many developers have been hurt by a selection of a specific framework in the past. I know I’m being asked so that some devs can go to their architect to confirm their particular positions. I’m hoping to avoid that in this post, but I doubt it will work.
New ASPNET5 Course Coming
I’m diligently working towards my new Pluralsight course and I am very excited about it. The new course is an end-to-end building of a web app using ASP.NET 5, MVC6, Entity Framework 7, Angular 1.4, and Bootstrap 3.x.
This course is a bit different than other courses I’ve done because we’re releasing it before the RTM of ASP.NET 5. Because of this, I wanted to let my students know what to expect.
Atlanta Code Camp Call for Speakers is Open
We’re excited to announce that the 10th Annual Atlanta Code Camp is coming this fall on October 24th, 2015! We’re holding it at Kennesaw State University in Marietta, Georgia.
Whether you’re a veteran of technical talks or itching to get your feet wet with your first session, you should submit your ideas to the code camp. We like to have a mix of venerable and new speakers.
Windows Phone, Surface, and Fanboydom
I admit it, I don’t know if that last word in the title is real, but anyway. I’ve used a Windows Phone since betas of Windows Phone 7. Like some of you I have the question of whether to believe the new Microsoft’s lukewarm support for the platform. Will Win10 be the savior of the platform or final coffin nail? I don’t have an answer to that.
I like to think that all that time has given me perspective, but I am not sure that’s true. I liken myself to a detached observer, but the reality is that I own a Windows Phone, a Windows Laptop, an Xbox One (and 360 before it), a Microsoft Band, and I even have a Spot Watch somewhere in a box. Does that make me a fanboy? I hope not, but certainly not a detached observer with a honest perspective.
Mapping Between Entities and View Models
As many of you know, my recent course on Pluralsight dealt with Best Practices in ASP.NET: Entities, Validation and View Models. As I’ve worked with clients, there seem to be a non-ending list of ways to deal with data in ASP.NET.
One of the topics that I am passionate about as it relates to the course is how to manage the Model to Entity relationship. While being pragmatic is important, I still believe that there are many situations where you want a separate Model for a view (server or client-side) instead of just using the Entities that you’re storing data with.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta4 to Beta5
For my upcoming course, I have a decent sized example that I’ll be teaching from. In the process of watching ASP.NET 5 go through the sprints, I have to upgrade the project at every step. I feel at some point I should be getting better at dealing with the sprints, but not yet ; )
Here is a short post that includes the different things I had to deal with in upgrading the project. It’s not just the ASP.NET 5 update, but also EF7 and a couple of small details.
Back in the Swing of It
It’s been a tough couple of months here at Wildermuth central. I’m finally feeling good enough to get back on my proverbial feet. The hair is longer, the beard grayer, and hopefully a little more wise.
You should hear a lot more of me now that I’m back home in Atlanta. I have a lot of web development experience to share with the blog. I hope you will enjoy what is coming.
My Entities, Validation and View Models Course
A few weeks back, I released a new course on Pluralsight. This new course talks through what I consider “Best Practices” (though there are no absolutes) for ASP.NET Entities, View Models, and Validation.
I was tremendously pleased to find it made it into the top ten courses for a few days. It seems to be resonating with some students and that makes me really happy. If you’re writing ASP.NET code, this course could make your job easier!
We're Coming Home!
So, it’s over. After a year on the road I am coming home. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my decision. While visiting friends in Thailand, I fell through a footbridge and broke my shoulder. With surgery and physical therapy coming we decided it will be easier in Atlanta than in Bangkok.
For me the real shame is that we have to cancel the Hello America Road Trip. I was really looking forward to crossing the country and meeting some great developers. Don’t worry we’ll reschedule it.
How'd You Build That Map?
When I started the Wilder World Tour, I built a simple map so my Mom could know where I was during the trip. I thought others might be interested too.
I’d been meaning to find an extra day or two to wrap this all in a little wrapper and share it. I finally found time the last couple of days. The result is travelMap, a library that allows you to build your own travel maps including showing current location, lines between locations, and popup information about each stop.
AngularJS and VS Code in Singapore
I’m currently in southeast Asia for my world tour. While in Singapore, I had the pleasure to chat with a great group of developers about AngularJS.
I love when I get great questions and the developers at this event were really keyed into the web stack and asked the hard questions about AngularJS (and of course AngularJS 2.0).
Announcing the Hello America Road Trip
UPDATE: Registration is open for most cities now. We’re happy to also welcome new guests including David Giard, Joel Cochran, John Petersen, and G. Andrew Duthie! Don’t forget to signup. Only two and a half months to the first event in Seattle with Scott Guthrie!
.NET Fringe is Coming!
As many of you know, I’m not in the country at the moment but if I were, I’d be going to .NET Fringe in Portland, Oregon on April 12-14th. This new conference is all about open source in the .NET space and I and really excited that a conference is focused on it.
I have a couple of small, older .NET open source libraries, but my real facination has been with where the overall community is going. Both Microsoft and the community at large are all going open source and it’s great news for us all I think.
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.
My Courses
