I'm somewhat into code golf. Placing restrictions on what you're "allowed" to do in code and seeing what the happens as a result. I'd like to share with you something that came out of some recent dabblings.

I recently had need to be able to access the API for Google Analytics from ASP.Net Core. Getting this up and running turned out to be surprisingly tough because of an absence of good examples. So here it is; an example of how you can access a simple page access stat using the API:

It's time for the first major version of fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. It's been a long time coming :-)

This post demonstrates a mechanism for proxying HTTP requests in ASP.NET Core. It doesn't proxy all requests; it only proxies requests that match entries on an "allowlist" - so we only proxy the traffic that we've actively decided is acceptable as determined by taking the form of an expected URL and HTTP verb (GET / POST etc).

All I ask for is a compiler and a tight feedback loop. Narrowing the gap between making a change to a program and seeing the effect of that is a productivity boon. The TypeScript team are wise cats and dig this. They've taken strides to improve the developer experience of TypeScript users by introducing a "watch" API which can be leveraged by other tools. To quote the docs:

I'd been meaning to automate the npm publishing of ts-loader for the longest time. I had attempted to use Travis to do this in the same way as fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. Alas using secure environment variables in Travis has unfortunate implications for ts-loader's test pack.

It all started with a GitHub issue. Ernst Ammann reported:

One thing that ASP.Net Core really got right was caching. IMemoryCache is a caching implementation that does just what I want.

If you're a user of Jest, you've no doubt heard of and perhaps made use of snapshot testing.

I recently had the good fortune to help run a coding bootcamp. The idea was simple: there are many people around us who are interested in programming but don't know where to start. Let's take some folk who do and share the knowledge.

Love me some Font Awesome. Absolutely wonderful. However, I came a cropper when following the instructions on using the all new Font Awesome 5 with React. The instructions for standard icons work fine. But if you want to use brand icons then this does not help you out much. There's 2 problems:

So project references eh? They shipped with TypeScript 3. We've just shipped initial support for project references in ts-loader v5.2.0. All the hard work was done by the amazing Andrew Branch. In fact I'd recommend taking a gander at the PR. Yay Andrew!

This a tale of things that are and things that aren't. It's a tale of semantic versioning, the lack thereof and heartbreak. It's a story of terror and failing builds. But it has a bittersweet ending wherein our heroes learn a lesson and understand the need for compromise. We all come out better and wiser people. Hopefully there's something for everybody; let's start with an exciting opener and see where it goes...

This post shows how you can use TypeScript with webpack alias to move away from using relative paths in your import statements.

How can we configure an ASP.NET application with nested properties Azure App Service Web App for Containers using Application Settings in Azure? Colons don't work.

Cypress is a fantastic way to write UI tests for your web apps. Just world class. Wait, no. Galaxy class. I'm going to go one further: universe class. You get my drift.

Let me start by telling you a dirty secret. I have an ASP.Net Core project that I build with VSTS. It is deployed to Azure through a CI / CD setup in VSTS. That part I'm happy with. Proud of even. Now to the sordid hiddenness: try as I might, I've never found a nice way to deploy Entity Framework database migrations as part of the deployment flow. So I have [blushes with embarrassment] been using the Startup of my ASP.Net core app to run the migrations on my database. There. I said it. You all know. Absolutely filthy. Don't judge me.

For the longest time I've been using the likes of Travis and AppVeyor to build open source projects that I work on. They rock. I've also recently been dipping my toes back in the water of Visual Studio Team Services. VSTS offers a whole stack of stuff, but my own area of interest has been the Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment offering.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single developer, will not be short of an opinion. Opinions on tabs vs spaces. Upon OOP vs FP. Upon classes vs functions. Just opinions, opinions, opinions. Opinions that are felt with all the sincerity of a Witchfinder General. And, alas, not always the same level of empathy.

I having a web app which is fairly complex. It's made up of services, controllers and all sorts of things. So far, so unremarkable. However, I needed to ensure that the controllers did not attempt to access the database via any of their dependencies. Or their dependencies, dependencies. Or their dependencies. You get my point.