/Dev/Summer Conference - Cambridge 2015

I’m just back from the attending and speaking at /Dev/Summer which was back in Cambridge this year with lots of great and interesting talks. I really enjoyed being part of this fantastic event and even more so for being able to give a talk about Open Source. The conference was hosted at the Moreland College, which is part of Cambridge university, and I have to admit that the overall venue was very well organized. The whole building was "state of the art" from the coffee machines to the projectors in each room! This is Cambridge after …[read more]

Generate ASCII folder structures on Windows with Tree

I was reading through Adron Hall's post yesterday about generating ASCII trees on Linux and Mac OSx. This is a handy feature if you want to include a project/folder structure to your documentation and don't wish to copy paste screenshots. What is an ASCII tree you may ask? There you go: Say hello to the tree command. This MS-DOS command has been around since Windows XP (YES really) but it's not well advertised. I only found out today and that's 14 years late! This is how to use it: Open your favorite command line editor (I jump between Powershell …[read more]

IValueConverter with MVVMLight on Windows Phone 8.1

I'm currently developing a universal app for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows store. This time around, I decided to do it right and use an MVVM framework. There are plently good ones to choose from, such as: SimpleMVVMToolkit MVVMLightToolkit MVVMCross I had started using MVVMLight some time ago on this project, so it made sense to look into it more seriously and make use of the right patterns instead of doing "Windows Forms" on Windows Phone. The benefits for using an MVVM/MVC framework are countless and there have been a lot of blog posts written on …[read more]

Create passwords and check password strength using a public Open Source API

The PasswordUtility API is one of the pet projects I've been working on for a while. Today I'm delighted to announce that the project goes to public availability. The solution hosted in Azure (where else?) and consists of 2 parts: A public facing website where you can test the API features A public API to use in your applications. The project is fully Open Source and it's driven by the PasswordUtility library hosted on GitHub and readily available to download from NuGet. If you're interested in knowing how the library works, I've put together a nice write up on GitHub. …[read more]

Logging and tracing with Entity Framework 6

Logging is important, especially when you have to troubleshoot an issue. That's when you realize that without logging you are "driving blind". Today's post is about logging with Entity Framework 6. I agree that there are tools out there that can help you with EF troubleshooting, such as Glimpse (if you are on a web application), SQL Server profiling etc. However, EF6 makes it extremely easy to log and trace executed statements and in this post I will show you how you can leverage this feature to create a robust and efficient logging solution for your application. Simple …[read more]

Changing SOAP message data and namespaces with C#

WCF, you got to love it! I don't, but then again I don't get to always chose which technologies I can work with. I've recently come across a very peculiar and annoying problem while working against a particular web service. I was able to hit the endpoints using SOAP UI but all calls from code were failing miserably. The project required importing a third party WSDL in order to generate the appropriate proxy classes etc. The WSDL had to be added as a Service Refernce instead of Web Reference as the exteranl API did not expose a Web Services Metadata …[read more]

WebApi documentation done right with Swagger

Finally, a decent tool that allows you to quickly and easy provide API documentation for your WebAPI project. With Swagger configured in your API, you get interactive documentation, client SDK generation and discoverability. Luckily, you don't have to roll out your own Swagger implementation and someone has already made sure that there is a nice NuGet package for you: [Swashbuckle] is a combination of ApiExplorer and Swagger/swagger-ui and provides a rich discovery, documentation and playground experience to your API consumers. Some of the features you get with Swashbuckle are: Auto-generated Swagger 2.0 Seamless integration of swagger-ui Reflection-based Schema …[read more]

./NET/Fringe retrospect - the best .NET OSS conference

I'm just back from DotNetFringe! Before flying to Portland, Oregon, I blogged about how Glenn Block arranged for a free ticket (thanks Glenn!) and helped me organise my first trip to the US in order to attend and speak at the conference. After having an amazing time in Portland, hanging out with some really cool developers and learning about a lot of new technologies and tools, I decided to share my thoughts about my overall experience and explain why you should make it your goal to attend next year. Yes, everyone agreed that there should and will be a follow …[read more]