Jeff Makes Software

I'm at a point now where POP Forums is mostly ported to ASP.NET Core, and I'm super happy with it. I've done some minor tweaks here and there, but mostly it's the "old" code running in the context of the new framework. I mentioned before that my intention is not to really add a ton of features for this release, but I do want to make it capable of scaling out, which is to say run on multiple nodes. I haven't done any real sniffing on SQL performance or anything, but I noticed that I had some free, simple load testing available as part of my free-level Visual Studio Team Services account, so that seemed convenient.

While porting a form from POP Forums to ASP.NET Core, I was surprised to find that there is not a TagHelper version of the old HtmlHelper AddValidationClass. In the old world, you could do a field group like this, using the Bootstrap magic:

Going way back to, I think, .NET v3, ASP.NET had this new thing called Membership. Maybe it was a version earlier. I dunno. "Neat," I thought, I can write a provider adhering to this interface and use my existing user and auth structure to plug into this system. Then I saw that the membership and role providers each had about a bazillion (maybe quadbazillion) members to implement, and reality set in that what I already had was working just fine. Some years later, ASP.NET offered Identity, this newer thing that did sort of the same thing. It even made its way into Core.

The volatility over ASP.NET Core made me pause (twice) since last fall when it came to porting POP Forums to the new platform. Every new release broke things to the point of frustration, and the RC2 reboot was hard. With SignalR falling a bit behind, it made things worse. But alas, that seems to be mostly behind us, and I've started committing stuff to a branch again, a little at a time, to run on the new ASP.NET. It's not at all usable, and every change seems to invite more changes, but I'm starting to see the potential and love for ASP.NET Core.

One of the things that ASP.NET Core promises is a faster, streamlined processing pipeline. Naturally, you start to wonder how fast your pages render before being spit out into the tubes. With the fantastic ability to chain middleware in the pipeline (think HttpModules and HttpHandlers, only without the bazillion events), it's super easy to wrap most of the processing in a timer.

I was chatting with a coworker yesterday about the various kinds of IT work environments that we've been in. It was largely in the context of the kind of influence we have, depending on our career stage. I was making the point that it's easier to "sneak in" the right things when you get further along, a perk that I've enjoyed a bit in recent years. There is definitely a difference in the flavor of environments that are out there, ranging from the full-on IT-as-innovator shop to the stodgy old heads-down status quo.

[This is a repost from my personal blog.]

Again this year, I did a couple of talks at Orlando Code Camp, the amazingly awesome free mini-conference that our local user group, ONETUG, has been putting on for a decade now. I am again fascinated by the vibrancy of our community, and all of the people who volunteer their time to share knowledge. It's humbling and amazing. (My decks are on GitHub, by the way. I won't rehash the mentoring and career development stuff here.)