Posts

In this post, let’s see how we can create an ASP.NET Core Tag Helper to show or hide UI elements based on authorization policies. But before we do so, let’s start with a quick introduction outlining why you may want to do this. The web front-end of SpeakerTravel, a side project that helps simplify travel booking for speakers at conferences and events, is built using ASP.NET MVC and Razor Pages. As it goes with many applications, there is going to be some point where you need authentication, and equally important, authorization.

Last week, I wrote a blog post a book about Streaming a Community Event on YouTube - Sharing the Technologies and Learnings from Virtual Azure Community Day. I ended that post with an appendix of things I’ve looked into but have no experience with. That… changed! Our Azure User Group held its first virtual session yesterday. The social aspect of hanging out with a group of peers was definitely amiss, but the streaming went well! This ime, we streamed on YouTube, with the help of StreamYard. I’ll write some observations and thoughts that build on the previous blog post.

Earlier this week, our Belgian Azure User Group has been part of the Virtual Azure Community Day (VACD). An online event hosted by user groups from Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Bulgaria. All online and streamed to YouTube, and organized and executed in ~2 weeks. Many have asked how we have done the YouTube streaming, and that’s what I want to share in this blog post, together with our learnings and things we would do different for future events.

My friend and colleague Matt Ellis has this habit of nerd sniping me. Sometimes intentional, sometimes accidental. Today, he asked whether we could have a quick look at an issue together, which ended up being a nerd snipe of the latter category. Here’s a blog post about how the new .NET project format references framework assemblies, and how it seems to be impossible to map those back to individual NuGet packages. Buckle up, sit back, and follow along!

In the .NET team at JetBrains, we try to be as responsive as possible on Twitter when there are mentions of ReSharper, Rider, or any of the profiling tools. Many of our developer advocates, as well as the development team, QA and marketing, are active on Twitter and keep an eye on what’s being talked about, to try and help out wherever and whenever they can.

While working on SpaceDotNet, a strong-typed client SDK to access the JetBrains Space HTTP API, I came across a scenario to deserialize JSON into polymorphic classes. In this post, I’ll explain how to write a custom JsonConverter for System.Text.Json to help with deserialization for such cases.

This week, I was presenting at IglooConf (Indexing and searching NuGet org with Azure Functions and Search). During one of the demos, I casually used a feature we shipped with the latest Azure Toolkit for JetBrains Rider: when the Azure Functions host is running on a development machine, Rider lets us trigger functions from the gutter by generating an HTTP request for it.

Right now, I’m having fun building a .NET Core client library for JetBrains Space. Part of that client library will be ASP.NET Core authentication, to help in making authentication with your Space organization easy. Think of something like this: This should look very familiar if you are building an ASP.NET Core application that uses something like Microsoft Account, Google, Azure Active Directory/B2C, or anything that uses the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.OAuth namespace. There are many of those extensions that help register an authentication handler for a specific service.

Many developers are building Single-Page Applications (SPAs) using popular frameworks like Angular, React or VueJS. They all come with an easy way to generate all required HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Webpack artifacts required to deploy to production, usually an NPM script like npm run build away. Having to build all those artifacts multiple times while developing on our local machine is not too pleasant, all of them come with a way to launch a development server that hot reloads artifacts when needed, usually another NPM script (such as npm run start) away.

I know, I know. That title is probably a bit too harsh and opinionated. But it got your attention, right? A friend of mine this week asked me whether they could use middleware in their HTTP-triggered Azure Functions, ideally even the same ones they use in ASP.NET Core applications. After all, the SDK comes with HTTP triggers that seem to use the same infrastructure, right? My immediate response was “whyyyyyy?!?”. And in this blog post, I’ll try to explain. via GIPHY