Great .NET Blogs to Follow: Part 1
The world of .NET continues to evolve and expand. And, as such, that means there’s a lot to keep up with.
But you don’t necessarily want to just dive in without a "net," so to speak. (Hence, our other recent recommendation-based posts on must-read programming books, great C# blogs to follow, and more.)
So here’s a look at my occasional perusal of the blog-o-sphere, specifically on some of the best .NET blogs to follow. (There are definitely some good ones for you this month!)
1. Build Please: Nick Chamberlain
Nick Chamberlain runs a great blog he calls Build Please. Just from an organizational standpoint, it’s quite well laid out. You’ll find a running table of contents on the right side of the screen. You can easily scroll and scan to find topics that interest you.
Chamberlain knows all the angles of .NET. Some of the topics he has covered include Domain Driven Design, Command Query Responsibility Separation, and Event Sourcing. He covers the principles of each, and clearly feels your pain as “everything becomes a decision-making nightmare.”
He also covers diverse .NET topics like using delegates, testing time dependent code, mapping nested JSON objects to a .NET dictionary and changing a type within a class when you instantiate. He also provides weekly keyboard shortcuts. I love those types of things—quick tips and tricks you can put to use immediately. Check out the rest here at Build Please.
2. Thomas Levesque
Thomas Levesque also runs a slick .NET blog. This no-nonsense blog covers tips, workarounds and sneak previews. One of his recent previews took a look at some of the new C# 7 features in the forthcoming Visual Studio "15" (not to be confused with Visual Studio 2015). He particularly likes the new lightweight installer, which sounds like a great idea indeed. His real interest is the compiler and works in some of the C# 7 features like local functions, pattern matching, and binary literals.
The rest of his blog is very hands-on and how-to focused, with posts covering explicitly switching to the UI thread in an async method, retrieving dates as UTC in SQLite, creating an auto-mocking container with Unity and FakeItEasy, and customizing string interpolation in C# 6. I like the practical, clear instructional tone of Levesque’s posts. Another side note about Thomas Levesque’s blog—you can read it in French if you’d like. Visit thomaslevesque.com to learn more.
3. Tony Sneed
Another notable blog comes to us from Tony Sneed. The native Slovakian trainer and consultant delivers a nice straightforward educational blog covering germane and up-to-date subjects like using the simple MVVM toolkit, getting your Visual Studio code ready for TypeScript 3, using EF6 with ASP.NET MVC Core 1.0, and moving to MVC 6 from WCF.
The MVC 6 post does a good job reflecting Sneed’s tone and style. “The time has come to say goodbye to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF),” he writes. “Yes, there are plenty of WCF apps in the wild—and I’ve built a number of them. But when it comes to selecting a web services stack for greenfield applications, you should no longer use WCF. There are many reasons why WCF has lost its luster, but the bottom line is that WCF was written for a bygone era and the world has moved on.” You can find Tony’s words of wisdom by visiting blog.tonysneed.com.
So you don’t ever have to go it alone. You’ve always got help getting the most out of everyone’s favorite framework.
Stay tuned for more .NET blogs to follow in the coming weeks!
Posted by Lafe Low on 07/20/2016