Shayne Boyer’s developer field notes, stories, and lessons from building software.
I'm noticing something unsettling in how I'm working, and I keep hearing the same contradiction from other developers: "I've never had this much fun coding—and I've never been more exhausted." The "satisfaction cycle" has collapsed.
Your agent picks the wrong skill. You debug for 30 minutes.
The Problem We've All Faced Picture this: You're debugging an issue in production, your container is running, and you need to inspect what's actually inside it. You fire up your terminal and start typing: Sound familiar? You're not alone.
Ever get that late-night ping from a colleague with "hey I did this thing, what do you think..
In today’s world of AI copilots, VS Code themes that change with your mood, and endless debates about tabs vs. spaces (it's tabs, don’t @ me), coding is as much about vibe as it is about syntax.
It's seems not too long ago I was laying down the words for "So Many Ways to Learn .NET in 2020", but of course it was March yesterday too. This list is still very valid; 101 videos (youtube | channel9), Microsoft docs, the various shows now available on the new https:
Did you know that every month, the docs team at Microsoft has a post for what's new in the .NET documentation? For each month there are new articles, updates to existing docs, and kudos for the community contributors. It's super easy to get involved in contributing to the docs for
I have been running the well known ghost blogging platform on Azure AppService since ghost was version 0.10, about 8 years. In fact, it was before Azure had resource groups. This means that it's Node on Windows Servers and I'm doing a bit of maintenance for upgrading the version
It's a new year and sure to be on your list, as well as mine, is learning. Here is a quick list of some .NET learning resources for you to check off that resolution for 2020. .NET 101 Videos - dot.net/videosIn September of 2019, many members if the
Do you run an open-source project? Use Visual Studio Code and its extensive set of extensions when maintaining your project or even coding day to day? If you have an extension or set of them you prefer/recommend for your projects; you can enable other contributors by informing them with
In my previous post, I showed how to take a WCF service and containerize it using Visual Studio. By doing so, this gives us the opportunity to push our heritage (aka legacy) application to the cloud either in Azure App Service using Web App for Containers, Azure Container Instances (ACI)
There are a number of reasons for moving long-standing .NET Framework applications like WCF, and ASP.NET Webforms to containers and then into containers or "modernizing legacy heritage apps". DevOps - Once the application is set up in a container, build a CI/CD pipeline to build and
The GitHub event announced a great new feature - GitHub Sponsors. GitHub Sponsors is a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day. See the full announcement blog post for more information. Recognizing Contributors Recently, Brian Clark introduced me to all-contributors
All related links: https://www.theurlist.com/autobloggerpost Jekyll is a very popular way to host a static site on GitHub and posting new content is a simple as creating a markdown file and then committing it to the relative repo. GitHub takes care of the rest. See the help
The options for pushing your .NET Core application to the cloud are not lacking depending on what IDE or editor you have in front of you. Visual Studio has a rich GUI interface with choices to pick pursuant to the architecture of your app - Web, Containers, SQL Server, Registries,
Many years ago I wanted to jump into a project in open source but had no idea where to start. I had worked with node.js, .NET and some other web-based technology but wasn't sure where to start and GitHub was new to me. Ironically, I fell onto Omnisharp and
If nothing else is true, containers have made local development on a platform so much easier. If you want to use SQL Server for your backend just docker pull microsoft/mssql-server-linux and you can start up an instance with a few parameters. Azure CosmosDB is not available as a container,
Keeping your code update to with the latest references can at times be a challenge with the rate of speed third-party dependencies can revise. However, with security patches and bug fixes constantly plaguing us it is a necessary exercise. I have been using dotnet-outdated to quickly run checks on my
The Docker extension for VS Code was recently updated to better support .NET Core applications and the experience is super nice! The extension already has great support for building your containers, pushing images to Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry and tasks such as running a specific image or tagging an
Since .NET Core was announced, I've really been loving the command line experience for .NET Core. Being able to use dotnet new to start a new application regardless of the OS or what shell/terminal experience is on a machine is the way to happiness. The Azure Functions team has
I am a sucker for a great tool and even better if it's open source. Recently, I wrote up a post on why we should care about containers where I used SQL Server on Linux in a container and loaded some test data for an ASP.NET Core application in
ASP.NET Core 2.1 added some great features for making external API calls easier to manage when there are network failures, or the service itself might be down. Scott Hanselman has a great series of posts where he has updated to take advantage of these features. Announcement on HttpClientFactory
Just recently the .NET Core June 2018 Update dropped and the ASP.NET Workshop I had just set up for CI/CD build was in need of an update to 2.1.1 (Release Notes). Get the latest 2.1.1 Runtime | 2.1.301 SDK from the downloads page
DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users. – Donovan Brown Build Status BackEnd Web API FrontEnd Razor Page App How often have you gone to a GitHub repo and found that the sample code is not up to date
There has probably been more than one time in your development career where you've spent a few hours troubleshooting an issue only to find out it was a dependency or versions issue right? Environments varying from one to next, outdated components and setting up development machines are frustrations we can
While I was creating a recent test application with Razor Pages, I found myself clicking the "new file" button in VS Code too many times when I wanted to add a new Page. I really love the .NET CLI and with every release, there seems to be something
In 2016 at the MVP Summit hackathon I put together a .NET Core CLI Tool to search for docs on docs.microsoft.com and it worked well, but there were some shortcomings. It was scoped to the project, and there was no way to install the Nuget package using the
If you have done any node.js development and have been required to hit code coverage marks prior to check in or CI/CD builds; you probably have used a tool like istanbul to check your percentages. image from instabul.js.org Getting code coverage reports on the command line
If you've been to a conference around .NET in the last year or so, there's likely been workshop available from the .NET team. Jeff Fritz, Jon Galloway, Maria Naggaga, Damian Edwards and/or Daniel Roth and I have all presented in part some of the ConferencePlanner app. The workshop contains
One of the responsibilities we have as Cloud Developer Advocates is having an understanding of the struggles of developers using the cloud in their daily tasks. One way to do that is to spend time looking over the latest questions on Stack Overflow with a little project called StackoverAzure. Instead
Still think this is one of the best things to happen this year! @Docker + #Kubernetes pic.twitter.com/Bgk6fCbruW — Shayne Boyer (@spboyer) December 19, 2017 A few days ago the beta for Kubernetes was checked off for me and I rushed to the machine to get cracking on the
Checkout http://shell.azure.com! A dedicated experience in a browser. No installation of the Azure CLI and all you need is your Azure account credentials to get going. I have even configured mine to use tmux by editing the .tmux.conf. Even works on the iPhone (as expected). Give
I like to use Docker compose files for a couple of reasons. First, I have spent more time that I have in my vacation balance to understand the format. Second, they are great for local development even when I only have a single container, obfuscating the environment variables into a
What if you could just add a package to your code? Like npm for node or nuget for .NET, run your app and have it in a container on a Kubernetes cluster? No command line tools like kubectl, helm, docker or whatever we are currently using to create our containerized
The Azure Functions team has been doing some great work lately and as a part of that work the runtime for the runtime of the serverless function was ported to .NET Core 2.0 in late September. This set the stage really for cross-platform development and running of Azure Functions
I recently picked up a Surface Book to start showing that I could do my job regardless of the machine I had. My talks around using command line for ASP.NET Core and Azure have primarily been using my MacBook Pro so to add some diversity to my presentations a
Modernizing legacy apps has become the theme towards the end of this year or also known as "Lift and Shift". Nerd Dinner is an ASP.NET 4.7 app...
Figuring out the best way to build and deploy any application regardless of the tech stack can be a sprint all in itself. So many questions to answer: What CI/CD pipeline do you use? Can't we just use the CLI? What about right-click-publish? Git Deploy? npm, yarn ? Docker, Kubernetes,
Creating a number of resources and organizing them in any software solution can get daunting without some sort of method to your madness. In a project, developers might decide to use logical folder structures or naming conventions based on a framework or what just makes sense. Azure Resource Groups is
Performance is always at the top of my mind when developing a web app. Using tools such as WebPageTest where a common hit against your grade will be the lack of CDN use will affect performance. Use of CDN - Each request for a piece of content to the web
Tab completion on the command line is like having a superpower for some of the CLI tools we have at our fingertips. With so many commands, paramaters and/or options; it's nice to be able to type a few characters and tap the {Tab} key and get some help. I've
Over the last couple of weeks, I've just skimmed the areas of ARM templates, CLI, Docker on Linux, Azure Functions and AppService Web Apps. Check out these articles and let me know if there is something you'd like to see more on; there's a ton to talk about to solve
In my most recent Pluralsight course, I spent some time talking about using Swashbuckle to create documentation for ASP.NET Core WebAPI applications. Swashbuckle is the .NET Core implementation of the OpenAPI Specification aka Swagger, but there are many other open source tools too for other languages. The demo project
One option for enabling the Swagger-UI capabilities is to direct the consumers of the api to http://petstore.swagger.io and have them put the url in the box at the top of the page. That's professional right? :-/ Alternatively, you can add the url of the service to the
In my post Testing Azure Functions with Postman and Swagger I showed how to use the API Specification capabilities in Azure Functions and then take the endpoint url and test the API using Postman. Notice the url that is provided for the API. It isn't human readable, nor something I
I've been spending quite a lot of time using Azure over the last many years. In fact, the portal was written in Silverlight. Now the the portal has a great modern UI and complimenting that is a CLI (command line interface) allowing for great automation, grep, awk, jamespath and much
A new feature (preview) in Azure Functions is API Definition. This feature allows you to use the OpenAPI specification (aka Swagger) to document the functionality of your functions and/or endpoints. Checkout John Papa & I talk about using Swagger for ASP.NET Core on Pluralsight in Play by Play
When sitting down to get started on a project, the start and stops of setting this and that up can be a non-starter. Sometimes, ok almost always, I just want check in code and have the build and deploy just happen. I'm a very big fan of CLI tooling. If
See GitHub Issue #795 for the details and discussion. One of the undocumented changes of converting from project.json to csproj, was the <DocumentationFile> no longer automatically copied to the output folder during the build or publish process. There have been multiple solutions, both pre and post publish
Taking on a new role as a Sr. Cloud Developer Advocate withing the Cloud and Enterprise group. What does that mean? Talking to the community about the technologies that I love; ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Docker, services and how these can best be run on Azure and what we