April 15, 2017

My experience with my first .NET Core contribution

I’ve written quite a few blogs here on how you can use .NET Core in your applications and what to expect when developing for this new platform. But with .NET Core being open source there’s also another story to be told, namely that of extending and improving the platform itself through open source contributions. So when Karel Zikmund from the .NET Core team reached out on Twitter asking the community to help them fix bugs before the .

February 7, 2017

Migrating existing .NET projects to SDK-based projects

In my previous blog post I talked about sharing .NET code across the various .NET platforms we now have within the .NET ecosystem (.NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin). In that post I also showed the new tooling within Visual Studio 2017 that enables (among other things) cross-targeting a lot easier than it was before. Since then two new versions of the new tooling experience for .NET projects have been released, and things have matured quite nicely.

December 5, 2016

Sharing code across .NET platforms with .NET Standard

One of the key things that makes Xamarin such a great platform for developing mobile applications is that you can leverage your existing skills with C# and .NET and use them to create awesome Android and iOS apps. This also meant that you could take existing code written for .NET and use it in your Xamarin apps. Of course, in the early days of MonoDroid and MonoTouch (before Xamarin was even a company) this wasn’t as easy as it is today.

November 18, 2016

.NET Core versioning

Unless you have been living underneath a rock you’ve probably noticed that yesterday, during Microsoft’s Connect() virtual event, .NET Core 1.1 was released. In addition ASP.NET Core 1.1 and Entity Framework 1.1 have been released. You can read up on the announcements in the following posts: .NET Core 1.1 - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/11/16/announcing-net-core-1-1/ ASP.NET Core 1.1 - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/11/16/announcing-net-core-1-1/ EF Core 1.1 - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/11/16/announcing-entity-framework-core-1-1/ At first sight this doesn’t seem like much of a deal.

May 24, 2016

.NET Platform Standard and the magic of "imports"

In case you missed it, .NET Core RC2 has been released by Microsoft last week along with ASP.NET Core RC2 and a preview of the tooling. Lots of exciting new stuff that I highly encourage checking out. Now that RC2 is out there I guess a lot more people will be checking it out and playing with it and there’s one topic that seems to confuse a lot of people. So I thought I’d write a blog about it to clear things up a bit.

April 22, 2016

Developing for .NET Core

If you’ve read my previous post you know that I have a keen interest in .NET Core. For the last two weeks I’ve been installing new RC2 builds on my machine almost on a daily basis to see if I could get something working and I’m glad to see that as of a couple of days ago things seem to be coming together. Obviously it still is a bit of a moving target but I feel like a lot of things are starting to settle.

April 18, 2016

Creating a VSTS dashboard widget

On the 30th of October last year Microsoft deployed an update for Visual Studio Team Services (still named Visual Studio Online at the time) which introduced a new start page that could be completely customized. The feature was named dashboards and when I first saw it I realized its potential for putting all kinds of information relevant to a development team right at their fingertips. For those who haven’t seen it yet, this is what the out of the box dashboard looks like:

April 2, 2016

.NET Core at Build 2016

As some of you might have seen on Twitter or Facebook I have attended Microsoft’s Build 2016 conference in San Francisco over the last week. It was an interesting experience with some good announcements, although to be honest I was expecting a little bit more. Then again Microsoft has become a lot more open about what they are doing which kind of takes the thunder away from these conferences. Free Xamarin, Azure Service Fabric generally available, Microsoft Cognitive Services and the Bot Framework are still great announcements though.

July 3, 2015

Using Invoke-SqlCmd in TFS Build 2015

Lately I’ve been diving into the new build engine in TFS 2015 RC (RTM release is planned for 20th of July). While running a build, I got the following error message: Mixed mode assembly is built against version ‘v2.0.50727’ of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information. This got me puzzled for a while, especially since the build continued to run and it was doing what it was supposed to do, except that at the end the build turned red because of this error.

June 30, 2012

Some thoughts on MS TechEd Europe 2012

Last week I attended Microsoft’s TechEd Europe conference in the RAI in Amsterdam. I had a great week. I’ve learned a lot of new stuff and I met with some interesting people. And since it has been a while since I’ve written anything on this blog I’d thought I’d do a little wrap-up of the conference and share with you some of my personal thoughts. I would like to stress that these are just my thoughts.

May 16, 2011

Extension methods and generic type constraints

I ran into an interesting problem the other day regarding extension methods and generic type constraints, so I though I’d write about it here. First, let me explain what I was trying to do. I wanted to define an extension method on any type that implements both INotifyCollectionChanged and ICollection. Now as far as I know there is only one type that actually implements both interfaces, ObservableCollection, but that’s not the point.

March 10, 2011

Data binding in code using Reactive Extensions

First of all, it’s been a while since my last post here. I’ve busy working with SharePoint in the past few months and although there is plenty to write about SharePoint, a lot of it has already been written by other people, so I didn’t feel the need to write about it here. But lately I’ve found the time to experiment with Reactive Extensions again, which I’m quite fond of as you might remember from me previous post about the subject.