Tools

.NET Core 3.0 comes with support for self-contained executables. It means we can publish applications as a single executable for specified platform. Also trimming – removing of unused code from assemblies – is supported. This blog post demonstrates how to build self-contained executables using .NET Core.

After finishing my writing about ASP.NET Core health checks I started finding a way how to visual health check results so I can display these on the wall mounted TV or big screen. This blog post introduces how to visualize ASP.NET Core health checks with Grafana and InfluxDB.

ASP.NET Core uses built-in dependency injection mechanism provided by Microsoft. This blog post intorduces how to use same mechanism in .NET Core console applications. For those who like other DI/IoC frameworks this writing provides demo about how to use Autofac with .NET Core framework-level dependency injection.

Next version of ASP.NET Core is getting better and better and with it we can use new tooling for Blazor applications announced yesterday at official ASP.NET blog. Blazor is Microsoft tooling to build WebAssembly applications using .NET languages. This blog post is short introduction to Blazor tooling and WebAssembly.

Sharing code and working together on it in real time from different locations has been issue for years. We have video chat and screen sharing for long time but working on same files together in IDE has been a dream. Visual Studio Live Share is here to solve the problem. Although the service is not generally available yet it is possible to try out early versions of it using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.This blog post gives straightforward overview of Visual Studio Live Share specially for developers.

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.

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.

I started learning SharePoint Framefork (SPFx) to get better on client-side development for Office 365. I decided to go with SharePoint Framework as it has simple lightweight tooling available and also because it is well documented. This blog post is short and practical introduction to SPFx and it brielfy summarized everything important you need to know to get your first client-side web part up and running.

Tizen is Linux-based open-source platform for mobile phones and TV-s. Earlier this year Samsung announced Tizen development tools for Visual Studio and now it is time to try out how things work. Although the tooling is still in preview and there is no stable version, it still possible to start playing with Tizen development. This blog post gives overview of my first experiences with Xamarin Forms and Tizen development.

Micro ORM-s are useful small ORM-s that are lightweight and map between objects and database queries. This blog post discusses when to use Micro ORM-s and provides example code where Micro ORM called Dapper is used.

Want to set up your RaspberryPi with Windows 10 IoT Core and have remote access to device with like remote desktop? Good news is that Windows 10 IoT Core supports something close to it and there is remote access app that works on Windows 10, Windows Phone 10 and even HoloLens.

One of my reader asked how to debug C# code using Visual Studio Code. This blog post provides simple step by step guide to C# debugging in Visua Studio Code. Works on Windows, Linux and Apple.

For my up-coming presentation “ASP.NET Core on Linux” I need Linux VM I can access with Remote Desktop to run Visual Studio Code. After hours of different problems that grew fast over my head I was able to make things work and now I have functioning VM I can use for demos. This post is short overview about what I did and it is for those readers who also want to have Linux VM with Visual Studio Code.

We are eager to try out our beer cooling solution and we want to see it in action. We want to visualize our data and keep eye on temperature of cooling beer. Before doing anything more complex like building web or mobile app we make a quick shortcut and bring our data to web, desktop and mobile. This post is about Power BI in action.

Some posts about my IoT solution that helps me to cool eisbock beer to freezing needed mathematical equations. I know I can use poorly supported MathML or bitmap images but both of these solutions come with problems. I tried to find some better solution and found MathJax.

Some sites need simple WYSIWYG editor just to provide some simple formatting options for some texts. I needed editor like this on one of my ASP.NET MVC projects. Although there are lot of editors and it is not hard to build your own simple editor I took Aloha Editor. Let’s see why.

NLog on is popular logging component for .NET applications. I am using it in one project where I built multi-threaded server that is running similar threads with different configuration. As those thread are independent services I needed way how to configure NLog to create different log file for each thread. Here is my solution.

Adding search capabilities to applications is something that users often ask. Sometimes it is not enough to have just filters on lists. Instead of going with mainstream and write complex SQL queries we can be smarter and use specialized indexing and search solutions that perform way better than custom large SQL queries that I consider as anti-pattern for searching something. In this posting I will introduce you Lucene.NET indexing and search engine and show you how to use it in your applications.

Here’s my little example about how to use Moq to mock HttpContextBase and it’s members to make controller tests pass. You can use this code when you are not allowed to use open-source or use-on-your-own-risk pieces of software that provide you this kind on initialization using built-in features. Also it is good exercise that introduces you how to solve mocking problems.

I found very cool small profiler that can also be used on production sites to quickly detect bottle necks in web application code. The profiler is called MiniProfiler and in this posting I will introduce you how to use it in your code.

Often asked question: is there any way to gather debug output of .NET program that is running on environment where Visual Studio is not installed? Yes, you can do it and you can do it for free with program called DebugView. Here’s how it works.