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2023

Containerizing .NET - Part 1

·1515 words·8 mins
This article is part of C# Advent 2023. For more articles in the series by other authors, visit https://www.csadvent.christmas/. This is the first in a series of articles on containerizing .NET applications. We’ll explore how to containerize .NET applications using Dockerfiles and dotnet publish. Containers have become an essential part of the DevOps ecosystem, offering a lightweight, portable, and scalable solution for deploying applications. This process is crucial for developers looking to streamline app deployment in containerized environments, focusing on efficiency, security, compliance, and more.

2022

Multiple Domains on GitHub Pages

Something I found out after moving from WordPress to GitHub Pages is that out of the box you can only host a single domain for a repository with GitHub Pages. This is a problem for me because I have a number of domains I was hosting at WordPress that I wanted to point at my GitHub Pages. Official Docs and the limitation # So officially, GitHub pages doesn’t support multiple domains. The docs here https://docs.github.com/en/pages/configuring-a-custom-domain-for-your-github-pages-site/troubleshooting-custom-domains-and-github-pages#custom-domain-names-that-are-unsupported state:

Customizing the Jekyll Theme

I haven’t done a lot with jekyll in the past, but I’m a big fan of Markdown everything. For me that usually means I’m taking notes in Markdown Obsidian, doing diagrams in mermaid in Azure DevOps or https://mermaid.live/. I’ve even started turning my talk slides into Markdown with a tool called MARP. Understanding when I use standard Markdown or some sort of templating language (jekyll uses Liquid) has been fun. I’ll do something in HTML or Markdown, then find out that Jekyll or my theme already has helpers to render that (like gists, videos, and figures). Sometimes rendering more advanced things takes a little tweaking of Jekyll and the theme.

Migrating from WordPress to GitHub Pages

I’ve been hosting on WordPress for a while. I wanted something that worked pretty well and was easy to work with. I picked a decent theme, added some plugins, pointed my domains and was up and running. I would work on blogs in Markdown, and then paste the txt into a Markdown. I could upload a few images and move them around in a wysiwyg. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot more in Markdown. All my conference talks were in PowerPoint but I’ve started switching over to Markdown slides using MARP. I should probably do a post on MARP sometime (I did :-) ). I wanted to reduce my overhead of WordPress Hosting and get back into more direct styling and coding of my theme. I decided to switch my hosting to Jekyll on GitHub Pages.

Validating .NET Configuration

·703 words·4 mins
This blog was posted as part of the C# Advent Calendar 2022. I really want to thank Matthew D. Groves and Calvin Allen for helping set this up! Look for #csadvent on Twitter! Make sure to check out everyone else’s work when you’re done here One of the great things about the configuration system in .NET is the type safety, dependency injection, and model binding. Something we can take advantage of is to validate our configuration on startup and fail if it doesn’t pass validation. Having that fast failure is awesome when working with containers and applications that have liveness and readiness probes.

Presenting Best Practices - Part 1

·940 words·5 mins
Presenting and speaking are skills that require practice to hone. I was a consultant for many years presenting to clients and customers of all levels and sizes. In addition, I started speaking and presenting at meetups, user groups, and conferences. Over the years, I practiced, I read, and I gave a lot of presentations. I’d like to share some of the learnings and best practices I’ve found in that time. I plan multiple posts, starting with Preparation. I’ll have more on slide design, and presentation tips.