Summers almost here!

And with that a chance for me to get back out on my bike again!

Before I do though, safety first. My bikes been sat in the garage all winter, so it needs it’s yearly check up. So many people don’t realise that this is just as important as regular maintenance on a motorbike or a car, I really don’t fancy riding down the road only for my handlebars to fall off or something crazy like that.

To that note there is ONLY ONE PERSON for the job when it comes to checking that my chosen 2 wheel mode of transport is in tip top condition.

This guy…..

Jonathan Kelly of Steel Town Cycles.

Now I know, many of my followers are not UK based, but like me, Jonathan is a small business owner. He works very hard as do all of us, to make a better life for himself, his family and his clients.

Many things in this world are not just about self preservation, but also those behind the scenes that never get the credit they deserve. Myself for example, where I live is a very small town, it’s simply not economical for me to have a car, especially with the way gas prices are at the moment, I can get around and look after my clients, because Jonathan is behind the scenes making sure that I stay on the road.

All too often we look at the world, and we remember the big giant corporate names, the multi million $$$ businesses that push every imaginable product in everyone’s faces all the time, and while the products they sell may be great, it’s these giants that drown out the little guy.

The UK is a nation of chancers and entrepreneur’s, every town in every corner of this land has them, we all sit there quietly working away, keeping things ticking over. Whether it’s me keeping another business’s web property running, or Jonathan making sure that I can get to my clients server when I need to, we are always there, always present.

Next time your looking for something in the area you live in, stop for a minute, take a deep breath and have a look around your local area instead, find a hard working tradesman who does what they do and takes pride in their work.

Jonathan has pulled my ass out the fire on more than one occasion, he loves his job, he loves bikes, he treats every one he works on as if it was his own, if your ever in my neck of the woods, and your hoping to do some cycling, he’s conveniently located a mere stones throw from the UK famous “Coast to Coast” cycling route, but enough of me singing his praises, why not go listen to the man himself tell you his story in his latest blog post at:

https://steeltowncycles.co.uk/2022/03/28/new-dreams-journey-to-the-future/

If your in the North East UK, then bring your bike along to see him, you’ll be glad you did.

Shawty

Converting Containers from Proxmox-VE back to plain old LXD/LXC

You can’t have failed to notice just how easy it’s become now to use a standard Ubuntu Linux install to manage and create Linux containers.

When I first started experimenting with these things, I was using Proxmox VE and it’s rather funky web frontend and plentiful custom scripts to manage my containers, and all was good.

Static Compression with Brotli in .NET/Core

If there’s one thing that benefits web applications, it’s sending lots of data, faster. 

To do this we’ve typically compressed our responses from the server to the client using a myriad of different schemes, the most popular of which has been GZIP. 

Unfortunately, GZIP was conceived way back in the 1970’s under Unix, and has not been changed at all since then. 

Security is HARD…

What can I say, we all know it’s true, if it was easy then there would be a lot more devs doing things correctly and a lot less data breeches these days.

Sometimes though, it seems like our development platform providers makes things far more difficult than they need to be, case fact was my experience recently with dotnet core and a blazor server side application…

Using a Full Framework SQL Server Project in a .NET core project build.

In this world of EFCore and migrations support that we have now, it’s hard to remember that at one time the primary means of performing SQL server database builds and changes was to use an “SQL Server” project type in visual studio.

In fact many newer devs who are only used to dotnet core might never have even seen the project type that I’m on about

A Little bit of Electronics Madness……

There’s a reason many of the members of my family call me a “Mad Professor”, ever since I was little I’ve had a habit of doing extreme experiments with electronics, and trying to use things in a way they where never really intended to be used.

On top of that, many folks that know me and/or follow my socials, know me better for my software exploits mostly using Microsoft’s .NET framework.

What many don’t know is that my degree is not actually in software, well not entirely anyway,

Using Dotnet Core Logging without using the DI container

Just before Christmas, one of our regular contributors to Lidnug posed the question on how to use the ILogger interface in dotnet core 3+ without injecting logger instances into classes used within a dotnet core application.

Making Blazor validation play nice with Bootstrap 4

There’s no doubt about it, blazor’s forms module and it’s validation features are fantastic.

You get all the benefits of using validation attributes on your models, along with a very fluid and real time UI model that works exactly the same in server and client modes.

There is however, one small problem with it all “Class Names”

Rediscovering Postgres and EF core

Its ok folks, you can relax, yes I’m not ill, yes I have gotten around to writing another blog post, yes I know…. I don’t write enough anymore and I should 🙂

With that out the way, why am I suddenly getting all excited about Postgres and EF again (specifically EF core)

Pure HTML Validation in Blazor

There’s been a lot of talk about Validation in the Blazor gitter chat recently.

The Blazor dev team have added some validation routines in that closley mimic the way validation works in ASP.NET MVC and many folks have been playing with them to see what they can do with them.

Chris Sainty has even produced a blog post [https://chrissainty.com/using-fluentvalidation-for-forms-validation-in-razor-components/] showing how to wire in the “Fluent Validation” libraries to make form validation even more awesome.