Using UTC in Applications

Using UTC dates for data is a pretty common and necessary practice but it definitely adds some complexity when managing dates as you always have to remember to properly adjust dates. For display purposes this is pretty straight forward, but for query operations there’s a bit of mental overhead to ensure your date math adds up properly.

No easy solutions, but I hope this post and some of the helpers make life a little easier for you – I know they do for me. 

Entity Framework half-heartedly supported Domain-Driven Design patterns. But the new-from-scratch EF Core has brought new hope for developers to map your well-designed domain classes to a database, reducing the cases where a separate data model is needed. EF Core 2.1 is very DDD friendly, even supporting things like fully encapsulated collections, backing fields and the return of support for value objects. In this session, we'll review some well-designed aggregates and explore how far EF Core 2.1 goes to act as the mapper between your domain classes and your data store. 

WhatsApp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired. Imgur scaled to over 40 billion monthly image views with just seven engineers. Instagram had 30 million users and just 13 engineers when it was acquired for $1 billion dollars.
This is the new normal: fewer engineers and dollars to ship code to more users than ever before. The potential impact of the lone software engineer is soaring. How long before we have a billion-dollar acquisition offer for a one-engineer startup? How long before the role of an engineer, artisanally crafting custom solutions, vanishes altogether?

Some months ago a feature landed in Xamarin.Forms that seemed to truly polarize the Xamarin.Forms community: support for styling applications using CSS. Some argued that it was an unnecessary introduction to "Web" technology to the native development experience, and others that it simply isn't the right solution to the problem.  While I sympathize with the latter opinion and think there's plenty of room for some good debate on the right path forward, I count myself as part of a third camp: I think that CSS is a powerful (and frequently maligned) solution to the problem of styling native mobile applications.

Today we’re happy to announce the availability of the release candidate of TypeScript 3.6. This release candidate is intended to be fairly close to the full release, and will stabilize for the next few weeks leading up to our official release. 

As you may remember, Microsoft has removed the IE Mode feature from Microsoft Edge. THe company has limited it to enterprise customers and IT admins. They have also stated that the feature was released to the public for testing purposes only. Here is a bit of good news - you can re-enable IE Mode when needed with recent versions of Edge! 

The team said that “most of their effort to improve the .NET Core Docker experience in the last year has been focused on .NET Core 3.0.” “This is the first release in which we’ve made substantive runtime changes to make CoreCLR much more efficient, honor Docker resource limits better by default, and offer more configuration for you to tweak”.  

Bootstrap has become the world’s favorite framework for building responsive web-projects. With the Bootstrap 4 Beta release just around the corner, it is time to take a more detailed look at what the project has to offer, what has changed and what one can expect when migrating over from Bootstrap 3.  

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a subset of the JavaScript language used for the definition and exchange of data. While I’m not proposing that we create a similar standard using C#, I do want to illustrate some of the rich object initialization syntax of the language.