Unconventional

If you've landed here, I can only assume you're like me and see packages as the highest form of sophistication in software development.  In that same vein, I bet at some point in the past you've wished you could start applying DRY principles to your client-side efforts.  I know for myself, I don't enjoy writing the same application bootstrap code constantly and so recently, I was motivated to codify it. This body of understanding has taken me quite some while to figure out, hopefully what I share here is helpful enough to get you up to speed.  No post is complete without some kind of example, so throughout I'm going to reference a package I've just finished putting together called protoculture . Briefly described, protoculture encapsulates all the common bootstrap and conventions I've been using while developing TypeScript apps that use React and Redux.  Honestly, I've already gotten a lot of benefit out of putting this package together, but nothing ...

Probably the first thing to be remarked when coming from any environment to .net is going to be the tightly integrated tooling. When I used to do PHP in the late 90s early 00s, it was pretty much whatever text editor I could get my hands on.  There were some non-free IDEs, but none that were easily obtained or as impressive as Visual Studio, which also wasn't free until around 2006. Despite the differences though, Visual Studio has always been first class.  When the same people making the languages are also making the tools, you can expect a lot of extra convenience.  One thing that's kept my interest is that despite the tight coupling, most everything is still quite generalized, unlike 4GL environments like Delphi. Contrast .net with PHP where all you get the language and are responsible for building your stack upwards from there.  Not that our favourite friends LAMP and LEPP aren't just as mature.  Things like PHPstorm have come along to give that first c...

My first real successes with server programming were back in 1998 when I started tinkering with PHP.  Back then, ASP was at version 2.0 and was - similar to PHP - a way to mix markup and scripting.  Both tended to yield some fairly interesting results and I'd say for the most part, both were quite comparable. As such, even back then I had a choice.  I could focus my tinkering on the Microsoft based tools, or I could try my hand at this thing called open source I'd been hearing about. I had everything I needed to succeed in both spaces. I could either download everything for free or I had complete access to a set of MSDN discs in a binder with a cover like this: If I wanted to build ASP scripts that spoke to Access or SQL databases, it wouldn't have been a problem.  In some ways, I even tried, installing all the tools and trying out the environments. Each time however, I abandoned the effort because I felt like I couldn't tinker my way into it. So, Instead I...

I'm not by definition a front end developer, although because I do back end development, things like program structure and build systems are interesting to me regardless of whether they target servers or browsers.  So while I can't make something look pretty, I still enjoy managing the complexity of JavaScript/ES transpiled apps. This is a seemingly trivial post in an area that I feel doesn't get enough attention sometimes. We recently purchased and started using a premade template for some minor projects at work.  It actually looks quite nice, has a responsive layout and isn't too terrible .  My usual complaints of "too much markup" and "lots of busy spaghetti scripting" still hold true, but most of this seems to be quite fire-and-forget. I ended up not being involved with the first few integrations of the template and while overall it ended up working, any trained eye could see where some of the cut lines were missed. I had resolved...

Had this tweet show up in my feed this morning and I think it's worth an explicit mention.   Eric Evans  talks a bit about Domain Driven Design, a topic he's also not coincidentally published a book on many years ago: Watch @ericevans0 ' talk from #DDDEU 2016: "Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" https://t.co/qu7YRJ943G pic.twitter.com/QxW0HB2xJs — DDD Europe 2017 (@ddd_eu) April 11, 2016 Something I've been encountering in my travels as a developer and leader of developers is the varying levels of motivation, confidence and enthusiasm my peers conduct themselves with.  At one point during his talk, Eric speaks about how a hypothetical carpenter spends more time talking about his output than he does how he might use any particular tool. Eric also - in my opinion - correctly highlights that the best people in the industry tend to be master technologists.  They constantly have their head in the space and are naturally disposed to aspects of t...

In an effort to get a better understanding of the ASP.NET framework, I've started a simple toy project from scratch.  I've really been enjoying how easy it is to plug everything together with Microsoft's reboot of the framework.  Just spin up a project.json file and get going, it's pretty impressive how much you can get done with so few files. I think the community has been doing a great job with blog posts, so I've not had many opportunities to contribute any unique content that isn't already covered. While working through things today however, I thought it might be nice to try and prove out how Entity Framework 7 can work with non-Microsoft databases and containers.  The most appealing at the time of writing being postgres thanks to the awesome work by the people over at npgsql . Because I've been developing in Windows using Visual Studio, the first thing that would be nice is to not have to spoil my system with a database installation.  No surprise, d...

@shanselman Not digging the bandwagon MS hatred for #PHP . #cantwealljustgetalong — Alexander Trauzzi (@Omega_) March 5, 2015 I tweeted the title of this blog post tonight and it got me to thinking about some of the encounters I have as a more or less polyglot developer who finds good and rewarding employment in PHP. I just finished attending the excellent and stimulating Praire Dev Con 2015 this week.  I'll let the web site speak for itself, but in summary it's a regional conference that attracts speakers from far and wide.  For two days, men and women enjoy a brief glimpse of professional-speaking disneyland , returning home late in the evening and passing out from social and intellectual exhaustion. One thing that many of my coworkers past and present have noted about this conference though is that it is very .NET centric.  Now to me this is of course no discouragement at all.  These are exciting (or possibly intimidating) times for many a Microsoft dev...