.NET 8

What I’m Excited to See in .NET 8

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.NET has evolved a lot since I first started using it years ago. I was introduced to it when it was released in 2002, but I wasn’t using it regularly until I started working at a new company in 2005. Microsoft recently announced the availability of .NET 8. This version of .NET is a Long…

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Asking ChatGPT to Play a Synthesizer

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I’ve been developing against OpenAI’s chat completion API — the RESTful version of ChatGPT — for a little while and up until now, I’ve avoided learning about the “function calling” feature. Honestly I didn’t quite get it and I didn’t see it as useful to my use cases, but with the announcement of the new…

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Getting Started with OAuth2 Authentication

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Authentication is a big and scary topic in the world of software development, but it doesn’t have to be. OAuth with PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) is easy to implement. OAuth is short for “Open Authorization”. It is a common way to access data on the web. You often encounter OAuth when you sign…

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Build vs. Buy: How to Decide When Adding Features to Your Software Project

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Creating new software involves a lot of decisions. When adding features, a common question is whether to write custom code or buy an existing product. There isn’t a straightforward right or wrong answer. Many people will tell you there is, but that is too simplistic. Many factors can influence the decision. How capable is the…

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Adding Angular to Your Electron App

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In an earlier blog post, I described how we could create an Electron tray application. In that post, we got a simple Electron application running. In this post, we will augment the application with Angular to provide structure and utilities helpful for building an application. This should be very straightforward, but if you try to…

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SQLite and Full Text Searches

SQLite and Full-Text Searches

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SQLite is an interesting database technology. While not a technology we would often use on the backend, it is great for mobile projects because of its lightweight nature. A feature many people don’t know about is its ability to perform fuzzy text searches (full text). This ability is pretty much baked into SQLite; it only…

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.NET 7 Has Arrived

.NET 7 Has Arrived

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.NET 7 is out, and it is a pretty significant upgrade. Performance, ASP.NET, MAUI, and C# 11 are some of the new features. Microsoft continues to improve the performance improvements of .NET. As I have discussed in a previous blog post, Microsoft has needed to improve the cold start performance of .NET for a while….

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RBAC vs ABAC

RBAC vs ABAC

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Most modern systems have some form of authentication and authorization. Authentication refers to figuring out who someone is (think of user login). Authorization refers to figuring out what a user can do within a system. Just because a user can log in does not mean they can do anything inside a system. In many systems,…

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More SQLite and Swift

More SQLite and Swift

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In my previous blog post, I mentioned using SQLite with an iOS application. In this post, we will extend that example to support text searching. While SQLite is a single file database that is pretty straightforward to work, it contains a powerful full-text search feature. To use this full-text feature of SQLite, you will need…

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SQLite and Swift

SQLite and Swift

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When building an application, you often need some way to store associated data. Applications usually store less data than cloud applications, but many of the same constraints still exist. You still need to store data. Some of the data is relational, such as contacts or addresses. And having the ability to store relational data in…

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