Unconventional

In an effort to get a better understanding of the ASP.NET framework, I've started a simple toy project from scratch.  I've really been enjoying how easy it is to plug everything together with Microsoft's reboot of the framework.  Just spin up a project.json file and get going, it's pretty impressive how much you can get done with so few files. I think the community has been doing a great job with blog posts, so I've not had many opportunities to contribute any unique content that isn't already covered. While working through things today however, I thought it might be nice to try and prove out how Entity Framework 7 can work with non-Microsoft databases and containers.  The most appealing at the time of writing being postgres thanks to the awesome work by the people over at npgsql . Because I've been developing in Windows using Visual Studio, the first thing that would be nice is to not have to spoil my system with a database installation.  No surprise, d

@shanselman Not digging the bandwagon MS hatred for #PHP . #cantwealljustgetalong — Alexander Trauzzi (@Omega_) March 5, 2015 I tweeted the title of this blog post tonight and it got me to thinking about some of the encounters I have as a more or less polyglot developer who finds good and rewarding employment in PHP. I just finished attending the excellent and stimulating Praire Dev Con 2015 this week.  I'll let the web site speak for itself, but in summary it's a regional conference that attracts speakers from far and wide.  For two days, men and women enjoy a brief glimpse of professional-speaking disneyland , returning home late in the evening and passing out from social and intellectual exhaustion. One thing that many of my coworkers past and present have noted about this conference though is that it is very .NET centric.  Now to me this is of course no discouragement at all.  These are exciting (or possibly intimidating) times for many a Microsoft dev.  I've

I started a new project late in 2014 which I knew would be fertile ground to keep pace with the what's happening in Laravel 5.  It's been a great learning experience merging in changes from the upstream Laravel project branch as they happened. The keen observer might have noticed however that Taylor made a commit on December 4th that "broke" support for packages designed to target Laravel 4. @Omega_ ehhh maybe… i’ll see how it shakes out… need to finish that up next week — Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) January 1, 2015 Patience is key, so I was happy to continue waiting for the next great thing . In Laravel 4, packages allow their configurations to be overridden per environment.  A package can ship a default configuration which can then be copied into the project as a template to be combined with the original's settings at runtime.  Think of it as a really tricked out  array_merge_recursive . By removing ServiceProvider::package , what's being co