Author: Chad Michel
A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 5: 3.5 SP1 (ADO.NET Entity Framework)
SqlConnection, SqlCommand, SqlDataReader, and SqlDataAdapter are classes we were very familiar with in 2008. If you wanted to write a database query, you were probably using a combination of these classes. Things changed in 2008 with the release of .NET 3.5 SP1, giving .NET a Microsoft-provided Object-Relational Mapping (ORM). A lack of ORM was becoming…
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Using AWS Cognito
AWS has a lot of great services, but one of the most useful is also one of the least sexy: a basic user management service called Cognito. Cognito provides authentication for users in the cloud. For those of us used to the Azure world, think Azure B2C but with a less awkward configuration. I actually…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 4: .NET Framework 3.0 (LINQ)
We have covered a lot of history in this series so far. We have covered many incremental improvements to C# and .NET. Things such as Auto-Implemented Properties were improvements, but they felt like incremental improvements to the language (although I think that one notable exception would be the addition of Lambda expressions). LINQ wasn’t a…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 3: .NET Framework 3.0/3.5 (WPF, WF, WCF, Auto-Implemented Properties)
.NET 3 was a pretty big change, maybe the most significant change since the creation of Microsoft .NET Framework. It was fundamentally changed in ways that brought in many amazing features into the language. Here I will cover WPF, WF, WCF, and Auto-Implemented Properties. The first change was WPF, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation….
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AWS Lambda with Azure DevOps
AWS Lambdas are, from a technology perspective, a lot like Azure Functions. They provide a simple and cost-effective way to host code in the cloud, and they can respond to a variety of events such as HTTP requests or queue triggers. Azure DevOps is a platform for hosting projects in the cloud, including task management,…
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Leave Nothing to Chance
“We learn from failure, not from success!” – Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula Last week, I gave a presentation called “Leave Nothing to Chance” at the Nebraska.Code() conference. The essence of the talk was the value of locking down all the little decisions to better ensure success in your software projects. I started the talk with…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 2: .NET Framework 2.0 (Generics, Partial Classes, Nullable Types, Anonymous Methods)
When .NET Framework 2.0 was initially released, I was working on a .NET Framework 1.1 project that was becoming a bit of a pain. Moving to 2.0 seemed like just the thing the project (and I) needed. The addition of support for generics in 2.0 was a win in and of itself, but also adding…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 1: Introduction
When you’ve been writing software as long as I have, it’s fun to look back at how far technology has advanced throughout your career. I’ve been thinking a bit lately about C and .NET, and basically the whole Microsoft stack. This led me down the rabbit hole of reading and remembering (and sometimes finding out…
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Up-skilling Software Developers: Nebraska Dev Lab Transition Academy
Education has been a common thread throughout our life at Don’t Panic Labs. It used to be about educating our team and the community through various public events. Then we created our Advanced Continuing Education program for developers, a week-long intensive that covers several topics around modern software development. With the creation of Nebraska Dev…
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Using CSVHelper
Parsing files is one of the most common coding operations we perform in software development. Often the goal of parsing a file is to transform it into another format. In this blog post, we parse some CSV data, read the data, and write the data to a CSV file. All of which is pretty easy….
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