So it's that time again. Another year has past, and like so many others I want to take a little time to look back at how I have spent my nerdy hours. Most importantly it has been my second years as an independent consultant, and I am still enjoying the freedom and the chance to work on projects that are very different. More...

Xplat has been the big topic around ASP.NET 5, but to be honest it does not matter that much for many of us. Sure it is always nice to have options, but if you work in a Microsoft shop or at an enterprise who see them selves as based on Microsoft technologies, then that is not likely to change - and why should it? The good news is that taking the framework and tooling apart to enable these options also brings a more aligned and flexible architecture, that solves some of the issues with eg. build setups that we have today. With that said, xplat is not all that ASP.NET 5 is about.

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With ASP.NET 5 which is currently in Beta 8, Microsoft has launched a new web server named Kestrel, which is of course Open Source. There are a number of reasons they are building Kestrel, but most importantly to provide a cross-platform web server which does not rely on System.Web and a full version of the CLR in order to bootstrap the new execution environment (DNX) and CoreCLR - which was not possible with Helios.

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Lately I have been using gulp with the new Visual Studio 2015 integration, which I really like. With so much good tooling in place, I think it is the right step for Visual Studio to embrace it. The one thing that is cumbersome about the experience currently is the setup required to get up and running. So, hopefully I can save others from a bit of trial and error with these ourlined steps.

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Pleanty of people have said that concurrency and functional programming are becomming essential to developing modern systems. Some have even gone so far as to say that if you don't adapt you will become a maintenance programmer in a few years. With the increasing need for concurrency to provide speed and handeling of huge amounts of data, I beleive it to be true. I do however beleive there will still be pleanty of smaller applications, so I am not predicting doomesday for anyone quite yet.

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I was asked to do a talk about Single Page Applications and Angular 2 in a couple of weeks. At first I was a little sceptical, because Angular 2 is far from a finished product yet. After agreeing that the main points could be around SPA architecture, TypeScript and how you can build these kinds of applications without using a framework I said yes. So lately I have been working on the talk and the first part has been quite easy to do. Yesterday I got started on demoes, and dived into Angular 2 for real.

At Build there was a number of huge announcements. It is amazing to see that Azure is keeping up the pace, and as a developer I am excited about the promise of services that will enable me to focus on implementing solutions rather than fiddeling with servers and infrastructure.

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Besides App Services, Azure offers an alternative that is slightly to the left of the far right on the big IaaS to PaaS scale called Azure Service Fabric. Conceptually Service Fabric is based on containers, allowing you to fit many services into a single VM and it gives you more fine grained control than with App Services by providing a manifest describing how it should operate.

Fantastic times! I just got back from a week off around easter, summer is almost here and I was awarded Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET/IIS for the first time. So all I that is missing is getting some blogging done.

At the moment I am really enjoying TypeScript, and I am feeling really good abouts future with the recent collaboration between the TypeScript and AnguarJS teams. I still argue that in most cases where you want your solution to live long, you should avoid the SPA frameworks. However I concede that they are popular, so it is a good step for TypeScript, which I think will help the adoption. I also think it will be good for Angular 2.0, to avoid introducing their own new language, and instead get the benefits of the good work done on TypeScript itself as well as tooling.

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As the design notes for C# 7 reveals, Microsoft are thinking about introducing pattern matching into C# in version 7. I was really happy when I first heard this, because pattern matching is one of the things I often miss from F#, where I wrote about the joy of pattern matching way back in the beginning of 2008. It doesn't get much more nice and succinct than this.

match value with
| "a" -> printfn "The value was an a"
| "b" -> printfn "The value was a b"
| _ -> printfn "Unknown value"

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