My Blog

New Coding Short Video: Should You Be Using Vue's Composition API?
New Coding Short Video: Should You Be Using Vue's Composition API?
June 13, 2021

If you've not noticed, I've been doing more video these days. I'm doing a weekly show called "Coding Shorts" where I cover topics that aren't course lengthed. The newest entry in this series is a demo of why I like Vue's Composition API. I convert an Options API to a Composition API and show you why I'm moving most of my Vue work to it.

New Video: Structural Typing in TypeScript
New Video: Structural Typing in TypeScript
April 18, 2021

I've got a new video that I released a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to share this out. It's about how structural typing works in TypeScript. Typing in TypeScript is a different animal than C# (or most typed languages) so I want to introduce it in one of my "Coding Shorts". I hope you like it:

My Next Film
My Next Film
April 11, 2021

NOTE: This post is going to talk about potentially triggering information and is not technical. You've been warned.

Coding Shorts: Demystifying Bitwise Operators in C#
Coding Shorts: Demystifying Bitwise Operators in C#
March 28, 2021

I have a new episode of my "Coding Shorts" series on YouTube. In this episode, I dig into something a little more esoteric: Bitwise operators. I show how binary math works and how it relates to enumerations (with Flags).

Hello World Now Available Outside of North America
Hello World Now Available Outside of North America
March 17, 2021

Our first release date for Hello World outside of the US and Canada is now here. For the countries shown below, you can watch the film via iTunes. The film has subtitles available for French, Dutch, Spanish (Latin American), and Portuguese (Brazilian).

New Video Series: Coding Shorts
New Video Series: Coding Shorts
March 17, 2021

I've started a new video series of short coding tutorials. The goal is to teach lesser-used techniques and they are less than 15 minutes each. I've got the first three up for viewing.

Dynamically Creating Components in Angular
Dynamically Creating Components in Angular
March 9, 2021

I was talking with one of my clients and they wondered how they could build individual components in Angular dynamically (or based on data/metadata). I knew this was possible but I hadn't done this myself so I thought I'd try to dig into it.

Releasing My Wilder Minds Courses for Free
Releasing My Wilder Minds Courses for Free
February 28, 2021

Over three years ago I launched a new option for learning at my company's website (https://courses.wilderminds.com). I was really excited to be able to create courses that weren't the mold of my Pluralsight courses. I wanted to be able to experiment with different ways of teaching people how to code.

I Was Wrong - Hosting SPAs in ASP.NET Core
I Was Wrong - Hosting SPAs in ASP.NET Core
February 15, 2021

If you've seen my projects or courses over the last few years, I had been advocating for using NPM for client-side libraries and SPAs at the same time. This caused the need to merge generated packages.json files. This added to the complexity. In addition, to handle the client-side libraries with NPM, you needed a way to both read the node_modules folder during development. This was handled with some middle-ware created by the late, great @OdeToCode (K. Scott Allen).

Tell Me I'm Wrong, Please (Angular and Async)
Tell Me I'm Wrong, Please (Angular and Async)
February 1, 2021

I'll try and keep this quick. I'm updating one of my Pluralsight courses and I am curious if what I'm thinking makes any sense.

Forcing ASP.NET WebForms Designer Files to Regenerate
Forcing ASP.NET WebForms Designer Files to Regenerate
January 17, 2021

This is going to be a relatively short post. I've been working with a company on merging their ASP.NET WebForms project with their MVC project. It's been an experience.

Vite for Existing Vue CLI Projects
Vite for Existing Vue CLI Projects
January 10, 2021

Running a build for your Vue is a common task for many Vue developers. The team behind Vue has been working on a development server to simplify this. This project is called Vite.

Hello World Has Been Released!
Hello World Has Been Released!
December 15, 2020

It's been a long time coming! I've worked on this film for the last five years and I'm very happy to announce that it's finally available!

Using Azure Slots and GitHub for Personal Projects
Using Azure Slots and GitHub for Personal Projects
December 13, 2020

I have a handful of web projects that I maintain. Some of these are sites like the one for my films (Hello World Film and Don't Worry, I'm Fine) but some others are community projects like Atlanta Code Camp. I've battled with the best way to develop and deploy these projects for quite a while.

On Inclusion
On Inclusion
December 6, 2020

I am fully aware at how this post may come across. I am a white male. A cis white male. A straight, cis, white male software developer. I am aware that talking about diversity and inclusion may come across as 'white savior syndrome' or at least tone deaf. Let's hope I can do better.

Should You Always Create a Nuget Package? Asking for a Friend...
Should You Always Create a Nuget Package? Asking for a Friend...
November 29, 2020

I have a couple of public projects (this blog, and the code camp website) that both use Azure Blob storage to store images for the sites. I've felt guilty that I've copy/pasted the code between them for a while. I decided to fix it.

Lazy Sunday with .NET 5
Lazy Sunday with .NET 5
November 16, 2020

It was a Sunday afternoon and I wanted to play with some of the new features of .NET 5 and learn something. I had a small irritation with bit.ly. When I customized a short-URL, I could never go back and update the link. That was enough for me to want to make something.

Revisiting Multiple Vue Projects
Revisiting Multiple Vue Projects
November 15, 2020

I've talked about how the term SPA annoys me. I think that client-side frameworks are great for expanding websites, not replacing them. With that in mind, I like the idea of a handful of client-side apps enhancing websites, but not every framework makes that easy.

Updating My Projects to .NET 5
Updating My Projects to .NET 5
November 12, 2020

I hope you're watching the .NET Conf happening this week. If you have, you know that .NET 5 was finally released. This version isn't a long-term support (LTS) version, but that doesn't mean that many people will be using it in production...at least I will be.

Handling Token Authentication in Vue 3
Handling Token Authentication in Vue 3
October 12, 2020

So many of the Vue demos I've seen fail to look at the authentication use case. For some of my course demos I've had to dig into it.

Playing with Vuelidate Alpha with Vue 3
Playing with Vuelidate Alpha with Vue 3
September 27, 2020

Vuelidate is reworking their project in light of Vue 3's release. It is only in Alpha, but I like the approach and integrated it into my Microservice demo I'm working on.

Hosting Vue in ASP.NET Core: A Different Take
Hosting Vue in ASP.NET Core: A Different Take
September 13, 2020

In the several years that I've been developing and teaching Vue, I've tried a lot of different ways to make ASP.NET Core and Vue play nice with each other. One of the strategies that I've seen employed (especially with Angular and React) is the Spa Framework Extensions out of Microsoft. Because Vue didn't work out of the box (or have a template) I dismissed this approach for a long time. Now that the platform has matured and there is an open source extension for Vue,

The Maintainers: Dennis Doomen and FluentAssertions
The Maintainers: Dennis Doomen and FluentAssertions
September 10, 2020

In this series, I'll be interviewing Open Source Maintainers and talk about what open source means to them and why they do it. This time I talk to Dennis Doomen of FluentAssertions.

The Maintainers: Nicholas Blumhardt, Autofac and Serilog
The Maintainers: Nicholas Blumhardt, Autofac and Serilog
August 31, 2020

Last week I released a new episode of my "The Maintainers" video series. This time I talk with Nicholas Blumhardt of Autofac and Serilog fame.