Over the last decade as Monsters we’ve been so fortunate to connect with so many great people in the industry. In this 5 part series leading up to episode 200 we reconnect with some of the visionaries, teachers, mentors and community members who have inspired us along the way.

This was a great conversation where we travelled from pressing issues such as the origin of peanuts in chocolate bars, to ‘meat space’, to the humbling experience of being a project manager and the amazing evolution of product development based on a deep and sincere conversation with end users.

Nik first crossed our paths working on a tool called Glimpse about a decade ago. Glimpse helped MVC developers understand better what was going on server-side in their applications, the ‘F12 Developer Tools’ of the server, so to speak. That began a wild ride from Glimpse, to RedGate, to Application Insights, to working with the WC3, working alongside others in the early days of Open Analytics to his current role at Microsoft.

Working on CodeSpaces now for about the last two years, Nik brings a wealth of experience, knowledge and a track record of impressive contributions to the open source community and in helping other developers.

Over the last decade as Monsters we’ve been so fortunate to connect with so many great people in the industry. In this 5 part series leading up to episode 200 we reconnect with some of the visionaries, teachers, mentors and community members who have inspired us along the way.

In episode ‘200c’ we get Andrew Stanton-Nurse on the line to talk about internships, the early days of Nuget and the MVC Framework as well as .NET Core. Once all long-out projects, Andrew had a front row seat on the teams that made those products real.

Today, Andrew is at GitHub, rewiring the innards to be more modular, experimenting behind the scenes and working to improve the code that serves and backs over 100 million projects worldwide.

Arjun Attam, Program Manager on the Playwright team, talks about the motivation behind Playwright. We hear from the source about the role of browser automation in today’s web app development ecosystem and hear some helpful tips on how to be successful with Playwright.

Arjun: https://twitter.com/arjunattam
Playwright: https://playwright.dev/

Over the last decade as Monsters we’ve been so fortunate to connect with so many great people in the industry. In this 5 part series leading up to episode 200 we reconnect with some of the visionaries, teachers, mentors and community members who have inspired us along the way.

In part 2 we catch up with Entity Framework advocate and specialist Julie Lerman. Julie’s been on the front lines seeing all the updates, staying connected to the EF team and presenting live (when legal!). Long time author, mentor and trainer, Julie’s known for jumping in and helping teams discover approaches to solving data problems.

In this episode we talk through the state of EF, upgrading from version to version, Cosmos DB, domain driven design, snow and kidnapping. Unfortunately, we were not able to settle who has the best maple syrup.

Settle in, have a coffee for Julie and sit back while we chew on all things EF Core (and more!).

Referenced in the show:

Vladik Khononov https://twitter.com/vladikk?lang=en
EF Core https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/
On Github: https://github.com/dotnet/efcore
Julie’s Pluralsight Courses: https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/julie-lerman

Over the last decade as Monsters we’ve been so fortunate to connect with so many great people in the industry. In this 5 part series leading up to episode 200 we reconnect with some of the visionaries, teachers, mentors and community members who have inspired us along the way.

In part 1, we visit with Jon Galloway, currently working on the team that is making the experience of development AWESOME for those who work on Mac.

We chat about the turns and hills that shaped his journey, the excitement and challenge of being someone who builds community, and what’s ahead in the years to come.

In today’s episode, we take a look at publishing self-contained single file executables in .NET 5. Publishing applications in this way allows us to easily deploy our .NET 5 applications to devices that don’t have the .NET runtime installed. We can even build executables for Linux from our Windows development machine.

Links:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/single-file
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/rid-catalog

Break your work down into smaller pieces that can be completed in the background, even if your user walks away from the page. In this episode we’re giving an into to Hangfire, a mature open source library that allows you to process background tasks in a fire-and-forget manner in any environment, local, server or cloud.

Project: https://www.hangfire.io/
Install: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Hangfire/
Repo: https://github.com/HangfireIO

Integrating a simple test to help prevent malignant input on your site is as simple as integrating a few lines of code into your website.

Now, if I could I’d pinch myself to make sure I’m not a robot, but I know very well that if I’m smart enough to think of that, they must have also programmed a sense of touch and pain into me as well. So testing to see if a website user is going to be even more daunting, because we can’t even pinch them.

Thankfully, the reCaptcha service offered by Google is free add-on to your site that will help to avoid bad data getting into your site, prevent malicious users from gaining access to your resources, and helping you to avoid unwanted side effects of bots that pile up junk data through your forms.

Read on to see how to get this all wired up in a Razor Pages application in ASP.NET Core. Heck, if you are in an MVC app or are building a Web API (or Azure Function) this would all still serve useful!

C# brings with it a bunch of new features. Top level statements or programs make it easier to get started in C# if you haven’t written a program in it before. They can also make developing small applications faster.

I’m pretty big on the SQL Azure Serverless SKU. It allows you to scale databases up and down automatically within a band of between 0.75 and 40 vCores on Gen5 hardware. It also supports auto-pausing which can shut down the entire database during periods of inactivity. I’m provisioning a bunch of databases for a client and we’re not sure what performance tier is going to be needed. Eventually we may move to an elastic pool but initially we wanted to allocate the databases in a serverless configuration so we can ascertain a performance envelope. We wanted to allocate the resources in a terraform template but had a little trouble figuring it out.