Although most of my work time is spent on ASP.NET and SharePoint development I also have some PHP projects. I have my own favorite thin tooling for PHP but I decided to give a try to Visual Studio Code (VS Code) with one of the projects. This blog post describes what I have in my dev box and what are my first impressions using VS Code for PHP development.

ASP.NET Core supports culture based views for more complex localizations. It means we have one view per culture per controller action. This blog post shows how to use culture based views in ASP.NET Core and how to implement them.

Most of requests to controller actions of our ASP.NET Core applications send some simple parameters or some serialized model objects. But this is not always the case. There are also those requests we don’t want to map to models but we need the request body to process, save or use it some other ways. This blog post shows how to read request body in ASP.NET Core controller action.

Tag helpers are classes that can be applied to HTML and special tags in ASP.NET Core views. They are addition to HTML helper extension methods and they provide more flexibility by having their own classes and supporting framework level dependency injection. This blog post demonstrates how to create tag helper to support displaying paged results in ASP.NET Core views.

Microsoft announced roadmap for upcoming release of .NET Core family versioned as .NET Core 2.1. While there are some new features and many improvements coming I compiled a list of my favorites that I see as most imortant to all developers building solutions on .NET Core, ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core.

ASP.NET Core makes it very easy to configure and use Entity Framework Core in web applications. For .NET Core console applications there is no such machinery available but we can still use Entity Framework Core in console applications. This post shows how to wrap database context initialization to separate class and use Entity Framework Core synchronous and asynchronous calls in .NET Core console application.

Want to try out features of newest of some specific version of C# but Visual Studio 2017 can’t compile it? Well, by default major versions of C# are supported and if some other version is needed it must be turned on from project settings. This blog post shows how to switch between C# versions in Visual Studio 2017.

Paging of data in ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core applications is timeless topic. It is invented over and over again and asked all the time in forums all over the world. Years ago I worked out kind of universal solution with reusable UI artifacts and I’m using these pieces this far. As ASP.NET Core is gaining more and more popularity I decided to start my sample solution with .NET Core and add full ,NET Framework and ASP.NET MVC 5 support later if asked.

C# 7.0 introduces ref returns and ref locals. Main goal of these new features is to make it easier for developers to pass around references to value types instead of copies of their values. This is important when working with large data structures that are implemented as value types. This blog post shows how to use ref returns and ref locals in Ć#.

NHibernate, the O/R-mapper that some people consider as dead, is actually alive and very much alive. The release of version 5.0 at last autumn was somehow quiet and didn’t got much attention. But there is something that brings NHibernate to modern era – support for asynchronous database access. This blog post gives brief overview of new async methods in NHibernate and shares some ideas about how to start using them.