Unconventional

A small post for today although something I think could trip others up.  I'm trying out the latest WebJobs 3.0 beta which is a port of the 2.0 version with .net Core 2.0 support.  This is really exciting as .net Core projects are considerably easier to work with than .net 4.x.  There tends to be less magic and they're a lot more command line friendly.

One issue is that in order to use the new WebJobs 3.0 library, my current ASP.net Core 1.x web applications need to be running on .net Core 2 to use it for dispatch.  This hasn't been too much of a hassle, it was largely just a matter of updating the TargetFramework entry in my csproj to netcoreapp2.0.  You may also end up with a few other items to clean up after that as the netcoreapp2.0 TFM comes with some useful configurations out of the box to ensure well behaved .net 4.6 PCLs are easier to get into your projects.

The one surprise I hit was that when I shipped things up to Azure App Service, I got a fairly hard error sayi…

Late last week, Amazon put word out that they're starting to look for a city to locate a second headquarters.  The fuel this announcement provides has the hype train in Winnipeg going so fast, it's missing stops.

I'm curious though.  As you've been digesting this exciting news, who have you spoken or listened to?
Was it this guy and his party's historic theft of public infrastructure (pdf) and incompetence with digital strategy? Or how about this guy, who maintains that Winnipeg doesn't need a proper rapid transit option?  You know, the kind that might actually catch the eye of handsome Amazon who now has Winnipeg trying to be the belle of the ball.


Runner up articles are Winnipeg's inability to join the 21st centry on active transport and the compounding of the aforementioned digital strategy mistakes.
Stop Listening to These Guys They are not technology experts. At worst, they're unabashed self promoters. At best they're conduits for very bad pol…

What fun!

The interesting twist is that I wasn't gaming! I did it for software development!

It's probably not a new concept, but I came about the idea of streaming my coding sessions while talking with my wife about my presentations and community involvement. A really good friend of mine streams his League of Legends sessions and seems to have a lot of fun doing it.  The sensation I got was similar to back in my early internet-faring days as I became aware of the breadth of people online.

My project of choice for this is kind of nice because it plays back into the streaming audience interest. Obviously to stream, you have to run some kind of source on your machine and the biggest game in town is something called OBS Studio. One neat feature of OBS Studio is that it allows you to configure a web-browser based overlay for your stream that simply inlines a web page into your stream.
This has caused a proliferation of web-based stream widget providers all vying for streamers to us…

I never had the chance to be ungrateful, the new splash pad at Kildare and Wabasha isn't a splash pad at all.  It was taken away from us and replaced with an "aquatic park", a little bit of wordsmithing designed to gloss over the fact that an open piece of our community has been replaced with yet another closed gate.

As I write this post now, I can hear it already: "Taken away, what?! It's a new water park, you're so..."
Sure, some might reach for that tired recrimination, which is why I started this blog post by dismissing such a premise.  To be fair however, I offer the response: Don't spoil this discussion with nonsense.
You see, I was grateful before the renovations happened.  The communal service on offer was adequate and I never complained about it or saw it as flawed.  Don't believe me? Here, this is a cute google-generated animation of my son enjoying the splash pad in 2014.

Today we took the kids to see if we could spend some time at th…

My last blog post was on building and publishing npm packages, specifically for typescript projects. In my opinion, packages are an important fundamental unit in software development. They sit at the confluence of technical competence and collaboration, and represent something the software community should be proud of.
Most of the time, you're going to be creating software packages once you're comfortable with some essential pillars: CodingProject structureSoftware architectureBuildingDeliveryCommunityLicensing
After I got my npm package up and running, my next task was to do the same thing with my C# libraries. Similar to protoculture, I have made a library called praxis.  This is done by leveraging the services and tooling known in the .NET ecosystem as nuget.


In this case, praxis abstracts many of the concepts and functionality I require when producing server projects. It builds on top of ASP.NET Core, so in that sense you can almost think of it as a framework-framework. The…