My Blog

The Reports of the Death of JavaScript are Greatly Exaggerated
The Reports of the Death of JavaScript are Greatly Exaggerated
June 16, 2018

Not John BoltonThe notorious quip by Mark Twain came to mind today as I was reviewing comments to my recent blog post about Blazor, a lot of the comments talked about WebAssembly being the death of JavaScript.

Who is Blazor for Exactly?
Who is Blazor for Exactly?
June 13, 2018

In case you haven't been following the news about WebAssembly (e.g. WASM), it's a new way to build something akin to bytecode for the browser. The latest versions of most browsers now support it including Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

Music City Code 2018
Music City Code 2018
June 2, 2018

Just got home from Music City Code conference had a great time catching up with attendees and other speakers. If you haven't made it to this great Nashville event before, plan for next year. It's well worth it.

Vue and ASP.NET Core - A New Course
Vue and ASP.NET Core - A New Course
May 20, 2018

In case you haven't been following on Twitter, you might not know that I've been working on a Vue course for a couple of months now. This particular course is now available as an Early Access model I'm trying out.

Are your Node-Based Tools Failing in Visual Studio?
Are your Node-Based Tools Failing in Visual Studio?
May 8, 2018

Since I do a lot of web development and teach web dev on the Microsoft platform, I spend a lot of time in tools that are node-based. If you don't know already, gulp, grunt, webpack, etc. all use node to run themselves.

Help Me Finish 'Hello World: The Film'
Help Me Finish 'Hello World: The Film'
May 5, 2018

As I expect most of you already know, I'm making a documentary film about software developers called "Hello World: The Film". I've started a crowd funding campaign to help me finish the film.

Beyond Bower Webcast
Beyond Bower Webcast
May 1, 2018

Thanks to everyone who came to my webcast today! As many of you know, Bower is depreciated so I've been looking at the different ways to move to other solutions.

Building a .NET Core Configuration Source
Building a .NET Core Configuration Source
April 15, 2018

As I've been teaching ASP.NET Core for a while now, some things I've been saying I've taken on faith. One of these was that building a Configuration Source (a provider that can read configuration and feed it into the configuration system) is fairly easy.

Using JwtBearer Authentication in an API-only ASP.NET Core Project
Using JwtBearer Authentication in an API-only ASP.NET Core Project
April 10, 2018

In my Pluralsight courses1 on ASP.NET Core, I show how to use JWT Tokens to secure your API. In building a new example for my upcoming Vue.js course, I decided to only use JWT (not cookies and JWT like many of my examples are).

Using UseStaticFiles with NPM Client Dependencies - Talk Me Out of It
Using UseStaticFiles with NPM Client Dependencies - Talk Me Out of It
March 28, 2018

Ok, please tell me how stupid this is. It's apt to be pretty stupid but I have a point to it. I'm trying to separate the ideas of prototyping quickly from preparing for production.

Orlando Code Camp 2018
Orlando Code Camp 2018
March 18, 2018

Orlando during Spring Break probably wasn't the best idea, but luckily I got to go to the Orlando Code camp instead of fighting people at Disney.

ASP.NET Core in Charlotte
ASP.NET Core in Charlotte
March 11, 2018

I'm getting around to this a little late, but late last month I had a great time presenting in Charlotte's Enterprise Developer's Guild. I showed them how ASP.NET Core 2 works.

Remote Views in Vue.js
Remote Views in Vue.js
March 11, 2018

I've been digging into Vue.js a lot lately. I'm working on a new course on it that will be released on May 1st.

Ready to Learn Bootstrap 4?
Ready to Learn Bootstrap 4?
February 18, 2018

When I created my Bootstrap 3 course back in 2013, I never thought it would take five years to get to the new version of Bootstrap 4. Back in 2016, I outlined and got ready to create a new course about Bootstrap 4. But it never came out. Until now.

Using Services in ASP.NET Core Razor Pages
Using Services in ASP.NET Core Razor Pages
February 8, 2018

I feel like the job of software developer in the last 20 years has been to decouple. Whether it's dependency injection or building modular systems, or even the new trend of micro-services; coupling has been the killer of everything good in software development (maybe).

New Day for Wilder Minds Training
New Day for Wilder Minds Training
January 30, 2018

As many of you know, I've been making courses for Pluralsight for a long time now. I think my first course was released in 2011.

New ASP.NET Core 2 Workshop in Atlanta
New ASP.NET Core 2 Workshop in Atlanta
January 22, 2018

I'm getting back into face-to-face training. And I'm starting with a new workshop on ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5. If you're in Atlanta or can get here, I'll be doing a three-day workshop from May 16-18th this year.

Re-thinking Running Migrations and Seeding in ASP.NET Core 2.0
Re-thinking Running Migrations and Seeding in ASP.NET Core 2.0
January 10, 2018

Back in ASP.NET 4, I really liked the way that it supported running migrations and seeding of the database for you. But in ASP.NET Core and EF Core, that hasn't come to the table yet.

New Year, New Skills: ASP.NET Core 2.0 and Angular Course
New Year, New Skills: ASP.NET Core 2.0 and Angular Course
January 2, 2018

Nothing starts a new year like a new skill or two. A couple of months ago I released a new Pluralsight course on building a website using ASP.NET Core 2.0 and Angular.

End of the Year Review
End of the Year Review
December 26, 2017

With the New Year coming, I thought I'd look back at the last year in my life. Warning this is going to be technical and personal, that way I can turn 50% of the people off with every sentence...just a different set of people with every paragraph ; )

Reverse Engineering Existing Databases in Entity Framework Core 2
Reverse Engineering Existing Databases in Entity Framework Core 2
December 20, 2017

In my ASP.NET Core 2.0 Pluralsight course, I specifically teach how to build DbContext classes and the POCO classes that go with them. But I've been getting many questions about how to work with existing databases, so I thought I'd explain it in a blog post.

Ending the Kickstarter
Ending the Kickstarter
December 1, 2017

I want to start by thanking everyone who contributed to the Hello World Film Kickstarter. It's been a humbling exercise. I've learned a lot along the way too.

Two Weeks Left in My Kickstarter!
Two Weeks Left in My Kickstarter!
November 24, 2017

It's been a crazy month for me. I've been spending a lot of time annoying my Twitter followers with announcements about the Kickstarter.

ASP.NET Core 2.0 and the End of Bower
ASP.NET Core 2.0 and the End of Bower
November 19, 2017

Bower is still being maintained, but they're recommending that people move their projects to Yarn and Webpack. As you may not know, I'm on a sort of campaign to avoid the complexity of something like Webpack until you really need it.