ASP.NET – Low Code Life

The New Shiny: Is Visual Studio Code for You?

UPDATE: As of November 18th, Visual Studio Code has gone Beta, and been released as open source. If you want to check out the source, or contribute, you can find the repo at:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

The beta release also adds support for extensions as well as many other new features. The full update list is here.

A day doesn’t go by lately without some new shiny toy being released for software developers to play with. A big challenge is deciding whether the new hotness is something you need to invest time in learning and using, or if it’s OK to let this particular popularity train pass you by. The recent release of the lightweight Visual Studio Code editor is no exception.

In this post, I’m going to help you make that decision, by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of this new tool. I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone for whom the full Visual Studio environment (Visual Studio 2013 Community, and sometimes Ultimate, depending on the project) is my day-to-day development tool of choice, so take that into account as you read.

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Microsoft Maniacs – Zero To Web – Slides and Code

Last night, I had the opportunity to present to the Microsoft Maniacs meetup in Sterling, VA. I want to thank everyone who attended, and share my slides and code. The slides are embedded above, and also included in the Github repo for my presentation, which is linked below.

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Slides and Code for NoVA Code Camp – Building Services with Web API

My thanks to everyone who attended my session at NoVA Code Camp 2015, “Building Services with ASP.NET Web API”. Below you’ll find my slides, as well as a link to the Github repository containing my demo code. Please note that the demo code contains many non-standard naming practices, so I would advise against using it as an example of how to name folders/classes in your Web API.

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Upcoming Talks and Classes

I’ve been scheduling a lot of events and classes over the next several months, so I wanted to provide a list for anyone interested in checking out one of my talks. Here’s the current list:

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NoVA Code Camp 2014–Getting Started with ASP.NET Web API

As promised, here’s my deck from this past Saturday’s Northern Virginia Code Camp, from my session on Getting Started with ASP.NET Web API.

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Creating and Consuming Web APIs in .NET

A quick note for folks who attended the Apex Systems Tech Talk I did this past Thursday. As promised, I’ve published my slides to OneDrive, and they can be found here:

http://1drv.ms/1qPINUn

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ASP.NET MVC, Bootstrap, and Internet Explorer Compatibility View

Works on My Machine…or Does It?

It’s always frustrating when you’re working on a project, and everything looks good when you’re running it from Visual Studio, and then you deploy to your web server, and suddenly something’s not rendering correctly. In this post, I’ll give you some tips for troubleshooting these problems when the target browser is Internet Explorer.

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Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: ASP.NET Web API

In this series, I’m exploring a variety of ways to build back-end data storage and services for Windows 8 apps (many of which, BTW, can also be used for other mobile and web apps as well). Here are the posts so far:

Overview – High-level view of some of the available platform technologies, and a discussion of the game leaderboard scenario I’m using to demonstrate them, as well as the games I’m using for my demos.
Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 1 – Creating the database and schema, using Entity Framework to model the data store, and using WCF Data Services to expose the model via as a RESTful service with rich queryability.
Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 2 – Deploying the service to Windows Azure, and wiring up the leaderboard service to the games, using a custom JavaScript library with a well-defined API.

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Make Script Performance Automatic with Custom Templates in Visual Studio 2010

Background

If you’ve ever used a tool like Yahoo!’s Yslow to analyze the performance of your web application, you’ve probably run into the recommendation that you should put your scripts at the bottom of the page, unless those scripts insert page content (a good example of this, which we’ll see later in this post, is modernizr.js, which dynamically adds support for semantic HTML5 elements to older browsers that do not natively support them).

Unfortunately, if you use the default MVC 3 templates in Visual Studio 2010, things like the script reference for jQuery are added in at the top of the page, in the <head> section of the document. This works fine, but may potentially delay the loading of the page while the external script is downloaded and loaded. You could, of course, manually move the script references each time you create a new project, but this would result in unnecessary duplication of effort. Continue reading Make Script Performance Automatic with Custom Templates in Visual Studio 2010