I remember when (Accelerated Mobile Pages) first came out, and it was very restrictive and weird. I think this ultimately hurt the AMP Brand Beyond this, several companies have built AMP experiences which haven't always been the best experience. I do however think AMP pages always load extremely fast. A lot of that is just the constraints of AMP. Last night I put my blog posts on AMP for a laugh, and it was much easier than I thought it would be.

I've been getting back into building scrappy little web apps for my friends. On top of this, I recently joined a startup and getting away from Enterprise class software has made me make a huge mind-shift. In the recent past when I wanted to build apps I was thinking Kubernetes, Helm Charts, etc. However, in small app, and startup land reducing the barriers to ship is very important.

So many people know me as a very performance focused engineer, and as someone that cares about perf I've always been a bit embarrassed about this blog. In actual fact this blog as it sits now is fast by most people's standards. I got a new job in July, and well I work with an absolute mad lad that is making me feel pretty embarrassed with his 900ms page load times. So I've decided to build my own blog engine, and compete against him.

Here we are, its 2017 dotnet core is out, and finally dotnet has a proper cli. In a previous post we explored the new cli. In short you can use the dotnet cli to build, test, package, and publish projects. However sometimes just using the cli is not enough. Sometimes, you land in a place where you have many projects to compile, test, and package.

Recently I had heard live.asp.net had started to precompile the razor views. I figured I'd dig in and quickly figure out how to do it.

Now that dotnet core tools have been released I thought it would be good to look into the dotnet cli. This is a new command line interface to build, manage, compile and run dotnet core based applications

Today marks the release of Visual Studio 2017, and with it the final release of the tools for dotnet core. This means as of today you can build, test, and deploy an application completely supported by microsoft. Not just the runtimes, but the tooling as well. The CLI for dotnet core has been finalized, and its awesome. The csproj system has been revitalized. New csproj's can be created, and are fully compatible with the old. Visual studio 2017 has finally released. This is probably the greatest version of visual studio ever created. Finally VS has gone from a slow, archaic editor, to a fast moving IDE. An IDE with a DevOps-First Cloud-First mentality. An IDE ready to tackle today's modern challenges.

Recently I wanted to make myself a short url host. Really, I made this not to make short urls, but to make memorable urls for myself.

tl;dr click here

When we talk about capturing metrics in applications. One server/service that constantly is in all conversations monitoring, is statsd. Incase you have never heard of it, statsd is a udp/tcp server that you send your in-code metrics to. These metrics get aggregated by statsd, and are forwarded to various backends. Some backends are services like librato or sumologic. Other times you are sending metrics to time series databases such as graphite or god forbid influxdb.

This boils down to in code you can say "log whenever this block of code is hit" or say "measure how long this function takes to execute". These stories come together to form pretty graphs, and rich alerts. All of this enabled by statsd.

tl;dr view this gist

So its 2016, and we are still making console apps/cli's. In fact I would say there has been a surge in popularity of these types of tools. I think we have come to the realization that buttons on forms are not automatable, and that the command line doesn't have to be scary.

I recently started writing an app in dotnet core, which is the new runtime for dotnet. In the past I have often used command line parser, but as of this writing it does not support core.

I was really lost trying to find an arguments parsing library when I realized the dotnet cli was open sourced.

After much struggle, failing to bingle. I started ripping through the Entity Framework, and dotnet cli's code hoping to find a gem. Thats when I stumbled across a diamond. You see many dotnet projects use Microsft.Extension.CommandLineUtils to do cli parsing.

dotnet CLI is currently in RC2, and while the train is fast approaching RTM, most tools are still catching up. dotnet seems to have a documented cli based install for every platform except the good ol windows. That being said getting a windows based install/build is possible.

So if you are like one of my co-wokers whom are newer to .net land you probably thought

"hey it would be good just to update all my nuget packages".

Then you quickly ran into issues.

So Beta 8 was recently announced, and I thought I'd update DotNetMashups to beta 8.

In case you havn't been paying attention, recently it was announced that helios was no longer a thing. Helios was the loader for ASP.NET 5 in IIS. Instead they are using the http Platform Handler to proxy the connections to kestrel.

So I thought that this was going to be a difficult update. I loaded the announcements repo in my browser and got to work. You can view the Pull request here.