C-Advent

2023 C# Advent - What's New in Entity Framework Core 8

This video is my contribution to the 2023 C# Advent event. It’s a highlight of some of the cool new features available in Entity Framework Core 8. Be sure to check out all the other contributions!

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Turning Any JSON API Into An App

The Internet is fantastic. There are a seemingly infinite array of APIs available for people to use. Many of them are completely free and open to use in pretty much any way you want to. For example, NASA has a wide variety of things available through its public API. I use one of them in Power Automate with a custom connector to post their daily image to Twitter. For my contribution to this year’s C# Advent, I will demonstrate how easily you can implement any JSON-based API into a C# based application.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

C# Advent 2021 - Using C# Code in Power Automate

This post is my contribution to the C# Advent 2021. Power Automate has a fantastic feature in preview that lets you add some C# code to your flows. It requires using a custom connector, so it’s limited to those with a license that allows that. There are also a number of other limitations which I’ll get into later. But it’s a start. Yeah, I know, if you want to use C#, why not use a Logic App or Azure Function? And that’s perfectly all right (and for production apps I’d go that route right now). But this is cool, so why not? I’ve blogged before about creating custom connectors in Power Automate. I glossed over the Code tab in that post, but now it’s time to return to it.

Monday, December 13, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

C# Advent 2020 - ASP.NET Core API Endpoints

MVC is a mess. Controllers in one folder, views in another, services in another, models and viewmodels in yet other folders. Related files are all over the place. Trying to piece together these related pieces can be a real pain. Steve “ardalis” Smith has come up with another way: ASP.NET Core API Endpoints. The concept is a simple one. Everything that’s related can easily be put in one folder, maybe even in one file. Steve explains much better: “Instead of Model-View-Controller (MVC) the pattern becomes Request-EndPoint-Response (REPR). The REPR (reaper) pattern is much simpler and groups everything that has to do with a particular API endpiont together.” By putting everything together, maintenance and development are all much easier. As Steve notes, this is a concept that the .NET team has done in creating Razor pages.

Saturday, December 19, 2020 | 6 minutes Read

The Nightmare Before Blazor

Boys and girls of every age Wouldn’t you like to see something strange? Come with me and you will see This, C# in WebAssembly This is Blazor, this is Blazor C# in my browser, what a sight This is Blazor, C# devs in WebAssembly C# in my browser, what a sight This post is part of the 2019 C# Advent. Check out all the amazing posts here. What better way to celebrate this C# Advent on a Friday, the 13th, than to talk about the nightmare that is web development. Devs have more ways than ever to write applications for the web. And now, into the vast wasteland of web development, rides Blazor.

Friday, December 13, 2019 | 11 minutes Read

Flow & Function Together - CS Advent

For this year’s #csadvent post, I am going to continue my posts about using Microsoft Flow to make our lives easier. This time, we’re adding in some Azure Functions as well. In a previous post, I covered creating a Flow that an attendee to a conference might create to watch for tweets that they might want to re-tweet. This time, we want to take on the role of conference organizers who want to watch the flow of tweets for how positive or negative people feel about our conference.

Monday, December 17, 2018 | 11 minutes Read

C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read