AI

Decoding the world of AI models

This post is part of a series that demystifies the world of AI from a software developer's perspective. In the previous blog post we covered the basics of AI and all the lingo you would hear in the hallways. In this edition we will focus on models and their role

A Developer's journey into AI

The digital landscape is evolving at breakneck speed, and nothing exemplifies this more than Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite being conceptualized as far back as the 1950s, AI has truly stepped into the limelight with the advent of ground-breaking tools like ChatGPT. This technological marvel is not just a novelty, it

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Unleashing the power of Source Generators in .NET

In the evolving world of .NET, a new feature was introduced in .NET 5.0 that might change the way we write code - the Source Generators. They are an addition to the C# compiler that lets developers generate code during the compilation process. Let's explore how to create and

The perils of over-engineering in code

In the realm of software development, finding the perfect balance between simplicity and complexity is a constant challenge. While leveraging advanced techniques and patterns can be beneficial, over-engineering can lead to code that is convoluted, difficult to maintain, and potentially inefficient. After coming across many codebases in my career I

QBASIC meets Azure Functions

Before we continue, I'd like to make a clear disclaimer: This is a bad idea, and under no circumstances would you want to run a program built with a thirty-one year old legacy programming language in production. Wait, what about JavaScript, which is around for over twenty-seven years and is

Creating real-time wake-words to trigger overlays in OBS

With the rise of the personal assistants, it is getting easier to build bots that are voice activated. So it got me thinking; why not build something similar for my own live stream, that will trigger a GIF overlay and/or play a funky jingle when a pre-defined trigger word

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A handy .NET global tool to deploy resources to Azure

If you haven't used the Azure CLI yet, download it now, it is great for deploying Azure resources from the command line. For example, to create a resource group named awesomesauce in the West Europe data-center location, simply just execute: az group create --location westeurope --rg-name awesomesauce It was also

Move ASP.NET Core to Azure Functions in 4 steps

Don't get me wrong, ASP.NET Core is awesome. I even wrote a book on it, and one should be using it for building any kind of cloud-first web applications. Azure Functions, on the other hand; is a fairly new offering from Microsoft Azure, and is focussing more on the

Simplify your .NET with custom SDKs

By now we all are most probably building awesome microservices that can save the world from doom. Bootstrapping these microservices should be quick and painless so we can focus on the actual implementation. By using the .NET Core SDK we can quickly bootstrap an API containing all the goodness we

My first book: Modern API Design with ASP.NET Core 2

Another item off my bucket list: My very first book, called Modern API Design with ASP.NET Core 2, has officially gone out to the publishers, and I'm reminiscing about the past three or so months of writing. The book is available right now for pre-order at Amazon. Authoring a

Elegant WhatsApp integration with .NET Core

It's quite annoying that WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging platforms, does not (yet) provide a consumer API. Although they might have valid reasons for not exposing some kind of public API, it forces the invention of other creative ways to automate WhatsApp messages. Disclaimer: By posting this blog

A dead simple HATEOAS provider for ASP.NET Core

While doing some research on Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS), I came across some great HATEOAS providers for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Core MVC, but they didn't quite fit my need, so I created my own one. Grab the source code from my GitHub

Additions to the .NET Core SDK Helpers: Install releases right from the CLI

Following my previous post on creating some handy helpers for the .NET Core SDK, I received some great feedback from the community - thank you! You can grab these handy helpers for the .NET Core CLI here. One of the requested features was to list available releases and install them

Use this helper CLI for switching .NET Core SDK versions

A friend of mine, Herman van der Merwe; recently asked me how one can use the .NET Core CLI to switch to a specific version of the .NET Core SDK. After crawling the web, and the official docs for that matter; I realized that the only proper way to do

ASP.NET Core Middleware: A Layered system

The ASP.NET Core framework is built from the ground up with extensibility in mind, having Middleware as the fundamental core to its architecture. From a REST perspective, Middleware is an implementation of the Layered System, which is one of the constraints for REST-fulness. This post is part of a

Use IServer from ASP.NET Core to create your own web server

So here's the thing, although I'm not an expert in creating HTTP servers, I thought it would be a good idea to show how easy it can be to implement your own one, using the IServer interface from ASP.NET Core. Say hello to the AwesomeServer The server we will

Servers in ASP.NET Core

As mentioned in a previous post, REST requires the implementation of a specific set of constraints. The Client-Server constraint is probably the most foundational and enforces a separation between the client and the server. This post is part of a series on Implementing REST in ASP.NET Core Some of

A new year, a new MVP reward

For me, March started great because I received yet another Microsoft MVP Reward for 2017 and I'm truly honoured to be representing this awesome community. Although I wasn't renewed last year, I'm absolutely stoked to be back in the programme. What is an Microsoft MVP award? In short, it is

Implementing REST in ASP.NET Core

The past week was hectic busy: Apart from being sick, keeping an eye on the little one and daily work; I gave three talks on ASP.NET Core in five days - very exciting. The basic takeaway of the talk was to highlight that REST is a style of architecture

Create your own "dotnet new" project templates

In case you haven't heard, Visual Studio 2017 RTM was officially released this week. With this exciting news, came the launch of the final 1.0 release of the .NET Core Tools. You can use this tooling to create .NET applications for cross platform use. dotnet new Jumping right in

Ask this .NET Bot all about .NET Standard

This bot links up to the FAQ of .NET Standard and provides you with answers to your questions about the .NET Standard in a convenient way. Quite recently I found http://qnamaker.ai which allows one to quickly create a FAQ service from your existing content, be it websites, text,

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ASP.NET Core & Xamarin Workshop at Dutch.NET

Just last night my good friend & newly awarded MVP Gerald Versluis and I gave an end-to-end workshop on ASP.NET Core and Xamarin at our Dutch.NET meetup, where we built a native Pokémon app complete with a secure back-end API in just over 2 hours. On the back-end I

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Stubbr: A simple request stub provider for ASP.NET Core

Building back-end services sometimes require stubbing of stuff. Stubbr is middleware for ASP.NET Core that provide stubs from a given pre-defined request endpoints configuration. Stubs can be sourced from local disk or a remote location. The stub configuration system is built on top of ASP.NET Core's configuration model,

A quick demo of Azure Service Fabric with ASP.NET Core

In this episode we take a quick look at Azure Service Fabric, a new platform for building micro-services on Azure and also see how one could use ASP.NET Core 1.0 to easily create micro-services for this powerful platform. The demo consists of a simple back-end API serving up

Xamarin and everything on Evolve

It's been a few weeks after #Xamarin Evolve 2016 and in this episode of GeekFest we talk to Xamarin expert, Gerald Versluis about some of the exciting announcements that was made during this annual conference and what it means for mobile developers. We cover iOS simulator remoting within Visual Studio