Author: Chad Michel
How NOT to Wait for an Online Meeting to Begin (and What to do Instead)
While waiting for online meetings to start, we often find ourselves passing that time in various ways. Unfortunately, this can distract us and possibly lead to us not being as engaged as we should be. There are things you absolutely should avoid doing while waiting for others to join an online meeting. As a person…
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A Super Simple JWT Example
Need to set up a JSON Web Token (JWT) in a project with a .NET Core 3.1 backend? Here’s a quick and dirty example of how to do it. First, create a Web Application project. After we have a web application project, we are already pretty close to done. .NET makes this process easy. The…
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A Proxy Controller for Managers?
All of the systems we design use essentially the same layered architecture. Our top layer is the manager layer. That layer is often consumed directly from our controllers in our ASP.NET projects. This usually results in us writing many thin methods that just call our managers. But what if we didn’t have to write those…
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JWT Verification Outside of an ASP.NET Application
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are common in today’s web-based world. The notion of JWTs works really well inside of the SPA to Web API world that many of us are currently developing. In these systems, the JWT is created by the user when the signs into the system. After sign-in, a JWT is created and…
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Using ASP.NET Identity in a Console App? Yes You Can!
Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework provides a really easy way to add authentication to your applications. For a classic web application, you almost don’t have to do anything. Just check a couple of check boxes and you are good to go. But did you know it’s possible to add ASP.NET user authentication to a console application? Luckily…
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Firebase Emulator!
Having the flexibility to do local development is essential for successful projects. While we have successfully completed projects without a good local development story, I feel we often regret it. Without a good local development story, we often have multiple developers sharing cloud resources. When developers share cloud resources we often end with contention over…
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We Are Building on Sand
As a software community, we suffer the fate of a million little cuts. We build systems built on top of other code, layers upon layers upon layers. And, unfortunately, each layer isn’t very solid. This last week while teaching some students, I ran into a seemingly small issue with an Azure Function. Azure Functions are…
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Many Hands Make Light Work…Sometimes
The adage “Many hands make light work” is something we often take for granted. If we get a lot of people working together on a particular task, we can quickly knock it out. Think of stocking shelves as an example. The more people you have, the quicker you can unload a truck and get the…
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Saving Time with the DataTestMethod Attribute
Automated testing has come a long way over the years. I remember using NUnit back in the early days of .NET when you needed a separate application to run unit tests. Since then, support for automated testing has improved to the point where we can run unit tests right from within Visual Studio. In this…
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Making the Most of Your Design Analysis Documents
Sometimes it isn’t easy to get everyone onto the same page. Everyone on a development team can think we are all moving in the same (and right) direction. Still, we often have different underlying assumptions about how certain features will be implemented. When we don’t have visibility into those assumptions, headaches can ensue. An excellent…
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