How Can AutoMapper Help You?

Justin Armstrong .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools 2 Comments

There are many times that when developing when you need to map an object to another object. When these situations occur, AutoMapper is the answer. It can be used for a one-to-one mapping out-of-the-box or you can easily customize the mappings to meet your needs. This also helps with only having one place to make changes when objects change or grow and more mappings are needed.

This allows just having one place to translate the objects instead of possibly many places scattered throughout the code. There will only be one place that needs to be updated when or if the objects get updated in the future. AutoMapper can also be used to combine fields such as First and Last names from one object into a Full name field in the mapped object.

In this blog, I talk about how to get started with AutoMapper for one-to-one, dynamic mapping. I’ll show an example of using AutoMapper with a basic mapping and to create a custom mapping….

Setting Up Angular 2 MockBackend

Todd Leininger Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Tutorial 10 Comments

Todd was working on a client project developing one of the company’s first Angular 2 applications when he found that he needed access to the REST services before they were ready. He needed a good way to mock them up, so he set up a mock service for an Angular 2 application using MockBackend.

In this article Todd shows a step-by-step example of setting up a mock of RESTful web service APIs for an Angular 2 application using Angular’s MockBackend. With this method, he could then use that mock to work on the application before the real APIs were ready.

Using RetroPie to Build Keyhole’s Gaming Console

Brad Mongar Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Keyhole 3 Comments

You know you work at a great company when you say to your boss that there is a Linux build for the RaspberryPi that is dedicated to playing old arcade and console games…. and he agrees to buy one for the company office for the low, low price of a written blog post about it.

Keyhole Software is just such a company and this is the promised blog post. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the process I used for setting up the Raspberry Pi. I’m hoping that it will give you a guide (alongside the official documentation) for making your own gaming console!

Using Toastr With SignalR

John Holland .NET, Articles, ASP.NET, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial 2 Comments

When you submit data to the server within a Single-Page Application (SPA), you are not performing the usual form post of data that would generate a new page load. Rather, you send the data using AJAX and are able to parse the response returned by the API using JavaScript and can act accordingly. In the past, this would most likely come in the form of an alert or populating a div with the appropriate message. This approach did what I needed it to do, essentially notifying the user of success or failure and allowing them to move on with their work.

Enter Toastr. Now I can have a non-blocking, consistent way in which to display these messages to the user, that are styled respective to the type of message it is. This is where the story gets interesting. So with this easy to use, non-blocking, consistent way of displaying messages, you can pair it up with SignalR and provide that same messaging from the server-side.

In this blog, we will demonstrate the use of the Toastr messaging library and how, when you couple it with SignalR, it can provide you with an easy-to-use, consistent messaging alternative.

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Creating a SQL Database Project for Isolated Development

Rusty Divine .NET, Articles, Databases, Development Technologies & Tools, SQL, Tutorial 2 Comments

In this article you see how to create a database project that will let you quickly and consistently deploy a database to your local environment. This approach can help to solve some issues from team members interfering with each other’s work on a shared development database.

Then, in an upcoming article, we will show you how to take the next step to include this database project in your continuous integration process and deploy it to each environment up the chain to production so that you can eliminate the need for any direct interaction with database updates.