Robert Boedigheimer's Blog

I'll be presenting "Tell Web Ads to Shut Their Pi-hole!" at Central Kentucky Microsoft User Group:

Speed up your browsing and protect your privacy and security by setting up a Pi-hole! It is free small DNS server that is “a black hole for Internet advertisements” that runs on a Raspberry Pi. We’ll talk briefly about the Raspberry Pi, then learn how to setup Pi-hole on your network for use with all of your devices. With a low cost Raspberry Pi and an hour of setup time, we now surf faster and more securely, with nearly 40% of our DNS queries blocked. Its amazing how much more enjoyable using the web can be, you’ll cry when you have to surf without it.

I'll be presenting "Advanced Fiddler Techniques" at Techorama 2021:

Fiddler is a great free web diagnostic tool that nearly everyone uses, but typically only for very basic things.  If all you need is to see the requests made between the browser and web server, the browser devtools can do that.  Fiddler has many more advanced features that most developers are unaware of.   It can be used to capture traffic from smartphones, tablets, and non-Windows platforms!  Discover the power of manipulating requests and responses with breakpoints, the auto responder, and a visual composer.  Review popular extensions for formatting JavaScript, syntax highlighting, and detecting image bloat.  Go beyond the basics and learn the full capabilities of the tool and how it can improve your web development and debugging techniques today!

I will be presenting Cryptography 101 at Adelaide .NET User Group:

Learn the fundamentals of cryptography, including public/private and symmetric encryption, hashing, and digital signatures. Discover which techniques are appropriate for various situations. Review practical real life examples for storing passwords, protecting URL parameters, securely exchanging information with partners, and safely encrypting sensitive information on public web sites. Concepts apply to all platforms, examples will be in C# for both .NET and .NET Core. 

I will be presenting "An Introduction to Browser DevTools" at MDC 2021:


Web developers use a large variety of tools to help develop and troubleshoot issues with web sites, but often overlook the DevTools in modern browsers.  Learn how to use DevTools to diagnose hard to locate CSS problems, debug JavaScript, monitor network usage, and many other common tasks.  Apply best practices from Lighthouse audits of performance, accessibility, and SEO.  It’s great that these powerful tools are now built directly into web browsers, discover how to use them develop better quality web sites more quickly.

I will be presenting Make the Web Faster! at the St. Louis .NET User Group:

This session demonstrates practical techniques that drop a web page's size from almost 3MB to 143K, and load time from 6 seconds to sub-second, while looking the same! Review tools that validate and describe performance best practices. Explore how to defer resource requests, load resources asynchronously, and prefetch critical resources. Learn the techniques that can have the largest impact on web performance with the least amount of work!

I will be presenting Make the Web Faster! at the .NET User Group of BC:

This session demonstrates practical techniques that drop a web page's size from almost 3MB to 143K, and load time from 6 seconds to sub-second, while looking the same! Review tools that validate and describe performance best practices. Explore how to defer resource requests, load resources asynchronously, and prefetch critical resources. Learn the techniques that can have the largest impact on web performance with the least amount of work!

I will be presenting Make the Web Faster! at the Philipine .NET User Group:

This session demonstrates practical techniques that drop a web page's size from almost 3MB to 143K, and load time from 6 seconds to sub-second, while looking the same! Review tools that validate and describe performance best practices. Explore how to defer resource requests, load resources asynchronously, and prefetch critical resources. Learn the techniques that can have the largest impact on web performance with the least amount of work!

I'll be presenting "Advanced Fiddler Techniques" at Roanoke Valley .NET User Group:

Fiddler is a great free web diagnostic tool that nearly everyone uses, but typically only for very basic things.  If all you need is to see the requests made between the browser and web server, the browser devtools can do that.  Fiddler has many more advanced features that most developers are unaware of.   It can be used to capture traffic from smartphones, tablets, and non-Windows platforms!  Discover the power of manipulating requests and responses with breakpoints, the auto responder, and a visual composer.  Review popular extensions for formatting JavaScript, syntax highlighting, and detecting image bloat.  Go beyond the basics and learn the full capabilities of the tool and how it can improve your web development and debugging techniques today!