We’re going to review how to work around the frequent and ever present error: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated.

Do you ever develop prototypes, or starter projects/accelerators, that you’d like to use again in the future? A good way to do that is by creating custom templates for dotnet. Once completed, anytime you want to create a new project of that type in the future, you can use key in “dotnet new ” and you’re off, complete with correct namespaces. You can even do conditional checks, or variable replacements.

REST services are everywhere. It’s tough to find an application that doesn’t leverage an externally hosted REST service in some way. Prior to .NET Core 2.1, a common library that was used to perform REST requests was RestSharp. I love RestSharp, but let’s explore the new alternative IHttpClientFactory that became available as part of .NET Core 2.1.

This post will walk you through the steps necessary to add a strongly typed appsettings.json configuration file to your console application. I’ll dispense with the formalities of writing a detailed introduction on why you would be interested in doing this and jump right into the steps involved.

Front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue are making big waves in software development. Microsoft makes great tooling for working with JS frameworks like those in the form of Visual Studio Code. There is also a large trove of information and tutorials getting setup inside the VS Code environment. One specific resource I really appreciated was Cory House’s Pluralsight course on setting up a JS development environment.

Here is a common scenario for you. You’re building an application… any application. It could be your side project, a sales tool, an ecommerce site, a REST api, a video game, a reporting dashboard. Anything. You’re building your app, and you reach a point that you’d like to try it out, to see how it would look to a user. How do you simulate a production scenario with no data to test with? If you’re lucky, you have data from an existing customer you can use, or there is a sample dataset available online. If you’re unlucky, you’re left generating dummy data using garbage inputs (random strings, random numbers, etc) – data that passes the regex, but doesn’t provide a good simulation.

Annotated below is a presentation from Nik Molnar, co-founder of the open source debugging and diagnostics tool Glimpse, who demonstrates several different strategies for improving the performance of your web application. This is easily one of the most useful conference presentations I have ever seen and I wanted to share it with everyone. If were curious about how to do any of the following tasks, this presentation will cover those for you.

For the past three years, a group of very smart and very generous people, have hosted a wonderful summer camp themed conference in Wisconsin titled ‘That Conference’.   It’s hosted at a giant indoor/outdoor waterpark and convention center, Kalahari Resorts.  The number and quality of the sessions is impressive, and may shock you a bit when you consider the entire ticket cost is currently under $400.