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

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.

Typescript for the C# developer

Over the past couple of years, my most popular talk that Iv’e taken around user groups has been the one where I describe what Typescript is, and how it relates to the backend C# developer.

Iv’e found that many back-end devs who would like to jump into client side development, are often put off from doing so simply beacuse of the percieved mess that the JavaScript eco system is in at present, and let’s be fair it’s not a compleatly unfounded reason either, beacuse JavaScript is bleeding at the edges in a great many places.

Build Automation for Dotnet Core Apps

In a previous blog post I documented how I built a “Build Server” to deploy .NET 4.6+ apps on windows 2012 server.

While this worked, and was a reasonably good way to do it, It wasn’t without it’s problems. During it’s use for example I frequently had timing problems, where just one little change to some JS code would cause NPM to overrun a time out by half a second, or where an SSH connection timed out just slightly before the build server completed it’s login, and on top of all that, it regularly used to take about 15 minutes to build and deploy the project it was being used for.