Great .NET Blogs to Follow: Part 2
There continues to be a lot of change in the .NET world.
With Microsoft open sourcing your favorite framework with .NET Core and the companion ASP.NET Core, things are changing rapidly—even for the tech world. You might need some outside help keeping up with the changes and the new ways you can use .NET Core.
Luckily the .NET blogosphere always rises to the occasion. As a follow-up to Part 1 last month, here are some more of the best .NET blogs to follow:
1. Daily .NET Tips
I’m always a big fan of these types of things—the tip of the day or tip of the week. You can be reasonably certain you’ll have a steady flow of good stuff coming your way. The daily .NET tips from dailydotnettips.com will keep you smoothly and accurately navigating all aspects of .NET. The tips are divided into the following categories: how to, .NET FAQs, C#, Visual Studio, devices, and cross platform.
They cover things like customizing the ink toolbar in a Windows Universal app, understanding the navigation pattern for iOS mobile app development, and turning on/off Application Insights exception display for CodeLens in Visual Studio. Many of the tips build on suggestions made in previous tips, so be careful if you start following this blog. You just might get hooked! (And if you have any suggestions or comments, you can reach them at [email protected].)
2. Tom’s Blog: Thomas LeBrun
Thomas LeBrun runs a simple, straightforward blog called Tom’s blog that also covers a range of .NET-related topics. Much like the daily .NET tips page, Tom’s blog is laid out nice and neatly, with the posts running down the left side of the screen.
Tom covers an impressive range of topics, including implementing a shake detector in your Xamarin.Android mobile app. This cool routine can help you determine when a user has shaken their device. While he found a previous iteration of such an app, he says he adapted the Java code to clean C# code.
Another post covers creating your own spying camera system with Microsoft Azure and a UWP application. Now of course you would only use this for legitimate purposes, like keeping an eye on your front door while you’re away for the day. Armed with a Raspberry Pi, a USB camera and Windows 10, you can enter the world of the IoT and start monitoring your property. Cool!
3. Code Rant: Mike Hadlow
Mike Hadlow’s amusing and informative blog is entitled Code Rant, from the coast of England. Hadlow’s posts cover topics like running the Kestrel HTTP server on Linux with CoreCLR. Hadlow’s posts are wonderfully detailed, with code snippets and screen shots to show you precisely how to implement what he’s talking about.
He also dives into some lengthy social and industry commentary with a post entitled “Learn to Code. It’s Harder Than You Think.” That title is a play on a U.K. initiative from the Year of Code in 2014 that was designed to encourage young people to check out software development as a career. (That program was called “Start Coding This Year. It’s Easier Than You Think.”) The post goes on to examine the differences involved in getting into coding as opposed to other careers, and how many developers are indeed self-taught.
“Even programmers with [computer science] degrees insist that they are largely self-taught. Others complained that it was a hard question to answer since the rate of change in the industry means that you never stop learning. So even if you did at some point have formal training, you can’t rely on that for a successful career. Any formal course will be just a small element of the continual learning that defines the career of a programmer,” he writes.
“We are left with a very strange and unexpected situation. Formal education for programmers seems not to work very well and yet the majority of those who are successful programmers are mostly self-taught. On the one hand we seem to have people who don’t need any guided education to give them a successful career; they are perfectly capable of learning their trade from the vast sea of online resources available to anyone who wants to use it. On the other hand, we have people who seem unable to learn to code even with years of formal training.”
Let us know if you have any other favorite .NET blogs in the comments below!
Posted by Lafe Low on 08/24/2016