Into the Core

James Bradley .NET, .NET Core, Articles, ASP.NET, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial Leave a Comment

The client Iโ€™m currently assisting has begun to move applications from more monolithic architecture into a more modern, cloud-based architecture. The organization is a bit of a .NET anomaly in that it is a company thatโ€™s primarily Java, yet has some .NET.

So even though Microsoft has a list of framework tools (such as Azure Service Fabric and Azure App Service), itโ€™s fair to say that asking a primarily Java-focused company to use those tools could be an uphill battle. This is where .NET Standard and .NET Core have come to the rescue.

I work with a ton of smart people and Iโ€™m pretty amazed at how fast they can pick up on things from reading. I, however, cannot really understand it fully until I touch it. So letโ€™s build a quick RESTful Web API step by step to see how challenging it is. Weโ€™ll be using .NET Standard, .NET Core, and ASP.NET Core.

Have You Plunkโ€™d Lately?

Chris Berry Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript Leave a Comment

More than once as a developer, Iโ€™ve come across the need to quickly prototype an idea or solution. This generally involves making a special project with all the necessary local parts, then going in and making the prototype. Doing this takes time and effort for something which in the end will probably just be throwaway code. Luckily Iโ€™ve now found a better way.

โ€œPlunkerย is a tool to prototype, experiment, share and debug your ideas on the web platform. From idea to implementation, Plunker helps you build something quickly and frictionlessly.โ€

Iโ€™ve found Plunker to be a great tool to use when I quickly need to test out an idea or solution. I no longer have to go through the process of creating a whole application locally just to see if I can do a loop with some data or something else just as simple. Now I can simply choose a template from Plunker, and I can get down to business.

In this blog I will introduce Plunker, showing how to use it to quickly create and edit an Angular startup project…

Unit Testing Your Architecture With ArchUnit

Cindy Turpin Architecture, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Testing 1 Comment

I am a Spring/Java developer (primarily) and an advocate of unit testing.

There is often a debate over what constitutes a unit test, an integration test, a system test, etc. But, most of us agree that tests keep you from going โ€œoff the railsโ€ once a project becomes sufficiently complex.

However, I have found very few discussions on architectural tests. What keeps us from deviating wildly unintentionally from our original, planned architecture? And, after all, how many enterprise projects even keep the same architects from the beginning of the initiative to shelving and replacement?

In this blog, I introduce ArchUnit, a Java architecture test library for specifying and asserting architecture rules in plain Java. Weโ€™ll discuss how it works to mitigate architectural risks in developing quality enterprise applications…

Java 10 and Local-Variable Type Inference

Robert Rice Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java Leave a Comment

JDK 10, an implementation of Java Standard Edition, was released in March 2018. It brought with it Local-Variable Type Inference to help simplify the writing of Java applications.

Basically, it’s a new syntax meant to reduce some of Java’s verbosity, while still maintaining the enforcement of static type safety. In simpler terms, you are able to declare variables, but won’t necessarily have to specify the type.

In this blog, I give recommendations for best practice when using Local-Variable Type Inference in JDK 10 with an eye for common var pitfalls…

Angular and Swagger: Experiences Learned

RJ Dela-Cruz Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript 2 Comments

Recently I was fortunate enough to be a part of a project where we were building an application from scratch into an Angular front-end application with Microservices in the back end. Swagger was used as the contract between the UI and Microservices.

In this blog, I talk about the things I learned from this project experience, like how to use Swagger to define the endpoints of the Microservices, integrating Swagger-generated code into Angular, and working with configuration (including oAuth2 tokens), among other โ€œgotchas…โ€