This article is part of a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems in DotNet.
In our first article, we saw how easy it was to set up a full ELK stack by leveraging pre-built containers. In this blog, I show how to leverage ELK in a .NET application and aggregate our logs into a single place. You will see just how simple it is to start getting some insights into your application. Let’s get started…
This is going to be the first post in a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems. In this post, I will show how to use Docker for Windows to set up an ELK (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) server that we are going to use in future articles. The series is particularly geared toward traditional .NET developers. Let’s get started…
With the explosion of the internet of things (IoT), many companies are competing to create the best smart home ecosystem for consumers.
Amazon Echo, for instance, is a robust system that allows the user to interact with their smart devices via voice command. Alexa is the application that the Echo communicates with, essentially the brain of the Amazon Echo. It controls how your Amazon Echo communicates with your other smart devices and services. It can sync with a variety of smart devices including switches, thermostats, garage doors, sprinklers, door locks, music streamers, news outlets, and more. It also allows the third-party companies to create custom skills which are then accessible through the Amazon Echo.
In this blog I will discuss the Amazon Echo and its Alexa application. We will go through the process to create a custom Alexa skill about the Keyhole blog, paying particular attention to keywords you’ll need to understand when you create your own Skill. From there, we’ll show how to test a Skill via simulators and deploy it to your Amazon Echo.
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….
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.
