Category: Things I’ve Learnt This Week

Things I’ve Polled

I started a short poll on Twitter, as I was curious to see how many people had already migrated from project.json to csproj. I had 84 votes and the breakdown was as follows.

• 68% All done – csproj for me
• 21% Not yet – In planning
• 11% Don’t plan to move yet

I was slightly surprised to see how many had completed their migrations already.

Things I’ve Blogged

• Migrating from project.json to csproj using Visual Studio 2017

Things I’ve Read

• Sharing .NET generic code under the hood
• Moving From Node.js To ASP.NET Core by Thomas Bandt
• No GCs for your allocations? by Maoni Stephens
• Bring back alt.NET? But… why? by Bring back alt.NET? But… why?
• Reviewing ASP.Net Core by Jeremy Miller
• Various sections of the ElasticSearch documentation

Things I’ve Listened To

• Eat, Sleep Code – Automapper for .NET Core
• .NET Rocks – VSTS Analytics with Steven Borg
• .NET Rocks – MVVM Cross with Martijn van Dijk
• Hanselminutes – The Road to Lead Developer with Linda Kamau of Ushahidi

Things I’ve Watched

• Took part in – HTBox AllReady Standup – 2017.04.01
• ASP.NET Community Standup – April 4th, 2017 – Where is Damian?
• C#7 and Visual Studio 2017 – Kathleen Dollard
• Abusing C# More – Jon Skeet

Things I’ve Blogged

• ASP.NET Core Anatomy (Part 3) – UseMvc

Things I’ve Read

• An Introduction to GraphQL via the GitHub API by Derek Haynes
• The implementation of anonymous methods in C# and its consequences (part 1) by Raymond Chen
• Json.NET 10.0 Release 1 – Async, performance, documentation and more by James Newton-King
• Converting From project.json To csproj by Jamie
• Building Better Entity Framework Applications by Jon Smith
• A visual introduction to machine learning
• ASP.NET Core SynchronizationContext by Stephen Cleary

Things I’ve Listened To

• .NET Rocks – Visual Studio for Mac with Mikayla Hutchinson
• .NET Rocks – Chaiscript with Jason Turner
• Hanselminutes – Hanselminutiae 18 with Richard Campbell – Nintendo Switch

Things I’ve Watched

• NDC London 2017 – Consolidating Services with middleware – Christian Horsdal

A light (and late) post this week as not only has it been very busy but also it’s been a short week as I’ve been away for a short break in Edinburgh

Things I’ve Read

• Chapters 3 and 4 of ASP.NET Core in Action by Andrew Lock
• Preventing mass assignment or over posting in ASP.NET Core by Andrew Lock
• Real-time ASP.NET Core by Radu Matei
• How we reindexed 36 billion documents in 5 days within the same Elasticsearch cluster by Fred
• Options for CSS and JS Bundling and Minification with ASP.NET Core by Scott Hanselman
• Disposing Resources at the End of Asp.Net Core Request by Filip W

Things I’ve Listened To

• CodingBlocks – Episode 57 – How We Badly Built Stuff

Things I’ve Watched

• ASP.NET Community Standup – March 21st, 2017 – LIVE at Treehouse

Week 8 of my series, sharing things I’ve learnt, read, watched and listened to, in the pursuit of expanding my knowledge about software development.

Things I’ve Blogged

ASP.NET Core MVC Anatomy (Part 1) – AddMvcCore – Dissecting and understanding the internals of ASP.NET Core MVC. In this post I looked at what the AddMvcCore extension method to the IServicesCollection does.

ASP.NET Core Anatomy (Part 2) – AddMvc – Dissecting and understanding the internals of ASP.NET Core. In this post I looked at what the AddMvc extension method to the IServicesCollection does.

Things I’ve Learnt

Debugging ASP.NET Core with csproj

This is something I’ve been checking into from time to time. I’ve been a heavy user of the ability global.json gave us in VS 2015 to debug into ASP.NET Core assemblies. Especially to help with my current ASP.NET Core Anatomy series. With the move back to csproj in VS 2017 we no longer have a global.json file to identify the projects we want to load source from. This was touched on in the ASP.NET Community Standup this week. Damian Edwards confirmed they are hopefully working on a solution, but at the moment there is no easy way to do this. With some ceremony it might be possible since the ASP.NET team themselves need to do this to develop the product. I’d love to be able to get my hands on a fairly simple set of instructions to enable this again.

Things I’ve Read

• CQRS in Azure – Part 1 by chilberto
• Event stores and event sourcing: some practical disadvantages and problems by Ben Morris
• Event Sourcing and Snapshots by Jonathan Oliver
• Error handling: Exception or Result? By Vladimir Khorikov
• Functional C#: Handling failures, input errors By Vladimir Khorikov
• It’s a bug! It’s a feature! It’s… a limitation of the fundamental design of your test framework? by Dylan Beattie
• MVC CRUD Actions Using KnockoutJS by Sibeesh Venu
• Event sourcing revisited by Gabriel Schenker
• Gist – How .NET Standard relates to .NET Platforms by David Fowler
• Asp.Net Core Error Management With Elmah.Io by Damien Bowden
• Why Your Next Web Site Should Be A Progressive Web Application by Chris Love
• DNC Magazine – Issue 29

Things I’ve Listened To

• .NET Rocks – Proto.Actor with Roger Johansson
• .NET Rocks – Moon Base Geek Out
• Windows Weekly 509 – Gongs R Us
• Hanselminutes – Feedback Driven Design with Windows 10

Things I’ve Watched

• ASP.NET Community Standup – March 14th, 2017 – WHAT IS THIS
• The Long Sad History of MicroServices by Greg Young
• What’s new in C# 7.0 with Mads Torgersen

Week 7 of my series, sharing things I’ve learnt, read, watched and listened to, in the pursuit of expanding my knowledge about software development.

Things I’ve Blogged

• Visual Studio 2017 is Released – Reflecting on the loss of project.json and looking ahead to the new VS 2017 experience

Things I’ve Learnt

ASP.NET Core MsBuild is Quicker than Project.json

It seems that the build time for the ASP.NET Core framework is nearly halved after moving back to csproj and MsBuild. Reduced down to approx. 28 mins from 52 mins. Read the tweet here

Live Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2017

It was a little disappointing to learn that the new live unit testing feature is not supporting .NET Core projects at launch. Looks like I’ll have to wait a while to try it since most of my projects are .NET Core at the moment.

Registering a Dependency with a non injectable property using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection

I was looking at an ASP.NET Core project which was using StructureMap to enable some more advanced service registrations that the built in Microsoft DependencyInjection package allowed. However, after looking through, I only found a few that I wasn’t sure how to register with the built in DI container. The project had a StructureMap registration like this:

c.For<DataValidator>().Transient().Use(() => new DataValidator(DataSource.DefaultData));

The DataSource.DefaultData is a static method in this case. After looking at the IServiceCollection methods, it seems the following line works with the default container to achieve the required result:

services.TryAdd(new ServiceDescriptor(typeof(DataValidator), p => new DataValidator(DataSource.DefaultData), ServiceLifetime.Transient)); 

Things I’ve Read

• I’m Leaving the EF Team, But Still Working on .NET by Rowan Miller – Big news and best of luck to Rowan. I’ve read much of his content about EF over the years.
• Is Your Code Hard to Understand? by Erik Dietrich
• Next Generation C# / .NET Helper Library Release by Dan Theurer
• Under the Hood of Stopwatch by Timur Guev
• New Git Features in Visual Studio 2017 by Kayla Ngan
• Relationship Hacks: An Allowance System for Adults by Scott Hanselman
• eShopOnContainers Microsoft Container Microservices Reference Sample
• Live Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2017by Steve Smith
• Unit Test Naming Convention by Steve Smith
• Changes to EF Core With the RTM of VS2017 and Tools by Julie Lerman
• Supporting both LTS and Current releases for ASP.NET Core by Andrew Lock
• Amazon Kinesis: the best event queue you’re not using by Chris Zelenak
• Difference between Visual Studio 2017 Community, Professional and Enterprise by Kent Bryant
• RayGun – High-performance real-time application monitoring – Great to a real world example of the performance work from Microsoft on ASP.NET Core. The benchmark figures have looked great, but this is the real test. Would be nice to know if this is using standard MVC controllers for the API or more custom middleware approach.
• TDD Harms Architecture by Robert C. Martin
• Event Driven Microservices Patterns by Carol McDonald
• Running an Elasticsearch cluster with Docker
• Azure Functions vs Web Jobs: How to choose?
• Optimize your productivity with .NET in Visual Studio 2017 by Kasey Uhlenhuth
• ASP.NET Core: Simple localization and language based URLs by Gunnar Peipman
• Do I Really Have to Unit Test This Method? by Nick Chamberlain
• Common Multithreading Mistakes in C# – III: Unsafe Assumptions by Ben Bowen
• Old csproj to new csproj: Visual Studio 2017 upgrade guide by Nate McMaster
• What is the Microsoft.AspNetCore metapackage? by Andrew Lock
• Using routing DataTokens in ASP.NET Core by Andrew Lock

Things I’ve Listened To

• .NET Rocks – Twenty Years of Visual Studio with Julia Liuson
• .NET Rocks – Visual Studio 2017 with Tim Sneath
• CodingBlocks – Episode 56 – Clean Code – How to Build Maintainable Systems

Things I’ve Watched

• Snippets from the Visual Studio 2017 launch live
• Talks Evening: How to change the engine on a plane in flight without crashing – Dan Wood
• 38th eBay Tech talk in Berlin: Raimo Radczewski on EventSourcing & CQRS (Feb 9th, 2017) – A really nice EventSourcing and CQRS talk – Something I’m actively researching at the moment.
• Pluralsight – Understanding ASP.NET Core Security by Roland Guijt – I watched the very good chapter “Centralized Authentication with a Token Service” about IdentityServer which helped cement some of the concepts a little better in my mind.

Tools

• AspNetCoreRateLimit – Rate limiting middleware – We’re looking at this for an API project currently. So far it’s been an easy addition and does most of what we need out of the box.