Connection Strings
3 .NET Experts You Oughta Know
You can get lost looking for good .NET blogs among the several dozen good ones online right now. Here are three -- from Nick Chamberlain, Thomas Levesque, and Tony Sneed -- that are worthy of your attention right now.
Some of the best information for writing code the right way -- outside of what you get at MSDN, Visual Studio Magazine and some of the more well-known sites the likes of which include Scott Hanselman and Stack Overflow -- come from the more independent-minded coders who are contributing their expertise right on their own personal blogs.
There are several dozen or more, but I'll cover three that are worth your attention now. And let's start with Nick Chamberlain, who runs a great blog he calls Build Please. Just from an organizational standpoint, it's quite well laid out. You'll find a running table of contents on the right side of the screen. You can easily scroll and scan to find topics that interest you.
Chamberlain knows all the angles of .NET. Some of the topics he has covered include Domain Driven Design, Command Query Responsibility Separation, and Event Sourcing. He covers the principles of each, and clearly feels your pain as "everything becomes a decision-making nightmare."
He also covers diverse .NET topics like using delegates, testing time dependent code, mapping nested JSON objects to a .NET dictionary and changing a type within a class when you instantiate. He also provides weekly keyboard shortcuts. I love those types of things—quick tips and tricks you can put to use immediately. Check out the rest here.
Thomas Levesque also runs a slick .NET blog. This no-nonsense, self-named blog covers tips, workarounds and sneak previews. One of his recent previews took a look at some of the new C# 7 features in the forthcoming Visual Studio "15" (not to be confused with Visual Studio 2015). He particularly likes the new lightweight installer, which sounds like a great idea indeed. His real interest is the compiler and works in some of the C# 7 features like local functions, pattern matching, and binary literals.
The rest of his blog is very hands-on and how-to focused, with posts covering explicitly switching to the UI thread in an async method, retrieving dates as UTC in SQLite, creating an auto-mocking container with Unity and FakeItEasy, and customizing string interpolation in C# 6. I like the practical, clear instructional tone of Levesque's posts. Another side note about Thomas Levesque's blog -- you can read it in French if you'd like (the English version, believe it or not, is an English translation of his French language site).
Another notable blog comes to us from another self-titled blog by Tony Sneed. The native Slovakian trainer and consultant delivers a nice straightforward educational blog covering germane and up-to-date subjects like using the simple MVVM toolkit, getting your Visual Studio code ready for TypeScript 3, using EF6 with ASP.NET MVC Core 1.0, and moving to MVC 6 from WCF.
The MVC 6 post does a good job reflecting Sneed's tone and style. "The time has come to say goodbye to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)," he writes. "Yes, there are plenty of WCF apps in the wild--and I've built a number of them. But when it comes to selecting a web services stack for greenfield applications, you should no longer use WCF. There are many reasons why WCF has lost its luster, but the bottom line is that WCF was written for a bygone era and the world has moved on." You can find Tony's words of wisdom by visiting blog.tonysneed.com.
So you don't ever have to go it alone. You've always got help getting the most out of everyone's favorite framework.
About the Author
Lafe Low has been a technology editor and writer for more than 25 years. Most recently, he was the editor in chief of TechNet magazine. He has also held various editorial positions with Redmond magazine, CIO magazine and InfoWorld. He also launched his own magazine entitled Explore New England, and has published four editions of his guidebook The Best in Tent Camping: New England.