Introduction As a beginner, creating your own custom HTML Helpers might seem a bit daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Eventually, they boil down to simple HTML that all web developers are familiar with. In fact, HTML Helpers are very easy to create and the difficulty scales directly with the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve …
Software Development Basics – Object-Oriented Programming
Life is complex. Developing software is complex. When creating software that models life, a paradigm is needed to break that complexity down into something that we can comprehend and that can eventually be implemented into a computer program. Object-oriented programming or OOP is one of the best known and most practiced paradigms available. There are four main tenets or concepts that …
The World through the Lens of a New Engineer
I have been spending a lot of time lately trying to see the world through the lens of a new software engineer. It is difficult because I need to forget everything I know and approach the task of developing software as someone that has never written a line of code. This is not purely an educational pursuit. I am trying …
Repository Design Pattern in C# Part 2
This is part two of a two part series. The first post covers the thought process that I often go through when implementing the repository design pattern. This post will show a complete implementation. I want to start by saying that I don’t really have a preference as to whether repositories should be coarse-grained or fine-grained. However, I do find that …
Repository Design Pattern in C# Part 1
This is part one of a two part series. This post covers the thought process that I often go through when implementing the repository design pattern. The next post will show a complete implementation. The repository design pattern has become very popular in the .NET ecosystem in recent years mainly because it is a simple data access abstraction that can …
5 Must Know Visual Studio Tips and Tricks
Visual Studio is an extremely large program. You are very unlikely to use even half the features of the program during your career. It is a tool that is very easy to learn and very difficult to master. Here are 5 tips that will help you move in the right direction. ALT + B + U The ALT + B …
Beginner’s Guide to Using Log4NET in an ASP.NET MVC Application
Logging is an integral part of any application. There are many options and not all of them good. Log4NET is a great framework for both simple and extremely complex scenarios, allowing you to choose the log format, the storage medium, and custom rules for messages and levels. Creating new message handlers is an easy process and Log4NET can be configured …
ASP.NET MVC Bundling and Minification for Beginners
Starting in version 4, ASP.NET MVC has been capable of bundling script and style files and minifying them to help make sites faster. Bundling and minification is not a black box. Its easy to see what is going on using only your browser. The image below is a default MVC application that has not been bundled. Without Bundling and …
The Difference Between Stack and Heap for Variables in the .NET Framework
The differences between variables stored on the stack versus variables stored on the heap when using the .NET Framework are, on the surface, small. However, if you understand what is happening behind the scenes, they are actually two different worlds. It is required that you understand a couple of things about variables before understanding where they are stored at. First, …
Two Unlikely Great Books to Read
I am a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. This opens up an entire world of books that I likely would not read otherwise in business, self-development, and fantasy (which I love) but, let’s be honest. Many of the books included in the Unlimited library just aren’t that great. I can’t count the number of books that I returned in disgust because the …