Development tools are an essential part of our job, they make us work smarter not harder, they simplify processes and make us more productive. In this post, I want to share some tools that I have found over the years that have made my job easier. If you have a similar experience with a tool that is not listed here, then I would love you hear from you. Grepapp ...
Idempotency, is one of the key features any Web API should have. The idea is that software is unrealiable, the network can fail, the database the API connects to could be offline, the API itself could be performing an intense operation that impacts performance. For all these reasons an API client may resubmit a request, not much of a problem if you are dealing with GET, HEAD, PUT or DELETE, these HTTP methods are idempotent, POST and PATCH on the other hand are not. ...
When building a Web API, RESTful or GraphQL, you may want to expose some functionality that allows a client application to sort data. From my experience, this is often not implemented correctly. Many developers fail to realize that sorting should always be sort plus one. The plus one is a unique value, like a primary key or identifier. The reason for this is that sorting in most databases, like SQL Server, is nondeterministic, meaning the sort function may return different results each time they are called with a specific set of input values even if the database state that they access remains the same. ...
In my last post I wrote about how you can leverage JSON Schema to do Web API validation. The main benefit is that the API can expose the schema as an API resource, clients of the API can consume the schema and execute it on their end against any data. The benefit of doing API validation like this is that the client does not need to duplicate any validation logic, they only need to execute the schema. In this post, I would like to explore API validation in .NET, using the library FluentValidation and exposing validation errors using Problem Details. ...
As an API developer, you will eventually need to determine how to handle data validation. The .NET ecosystem offers a few options, the first option, validation attributes, can be used to annotate how a model should be validated. Validation attributes are great, they don’t require any external dependencies, you can specify error messages, create your own custom validator, validate against many data types. For example, take the following Movie class, notice how the properties have been annotated with validation rules. ...
Recently I was asked to review a Web API written in Node.js. The API exposes an authentication endpoint, this authentication endpoint must be highly available, responsive, and it cannot become a bottleneck, otherwise, the user experience is severely impacted. Unfortunately, the endpoint had become a bottleneck and was impacting the overall performance of the application. Upon further review, it was determined that the problem was coming from a hashing function that takes the user’s password, hashes it, and compares the result with the stored hashed password from the database. Here is the code without the implementation details. ...
I was looking through some of my bookmarked Github issues when I rediscovered issue #32488, in that issue a comment was made that caught my attention. The comment stated that in .NET the order of interfaces impacts performance. This is because in the .NET CLR all class definitions have a collection of methods and interface definitions. Casting is a linear search that walks the interface definition. If you are constantly casting to an Interface located at the end then the CLR must do a longer walk. ...
Writing good documentation is such an underrated skill, to that extent so is writing ReadME files, ReadME files can be an awesome addition to your project. They give you an opportunity to document all sorts of stuff. For me, a good project should come along with a good ReadME file. The file should outline everything that is necessary for me to interact with the project. Like how to run the unit/integration test, the project’s architecture, any terminology, the roadmap for the project, and the most important piece, examples on how to use the project. ...
HTML, CSS, and Javascript, are the languages of the world wide web, the platform. They are used to create websites, to make them interactive, and to make them beautiful. At one point in my career, I was more plugged into this world. A world that I feel I’ve fallen behind since I myself have not exclusively worked on a UI project since the days of AngularJS. That doesn’t mean that I don’t do any front-end work anymore, it is just that these days I spent most of the time doing back-end development. I am familiar with some of the modern frameworks like Angular, React.js, Next.js and everyone’s new favorite, svelte. By falling behind I mean that I am not up to date with some of the new tools and technologies that have been created since the days of AngularJS. I want to use this post to write about some of these new techniques and tools that are available for front-end development. ...
A worker service is a type of Background Service that are generally use for long-running task. They can be seen as the equivalent of Windows Services in the .NET Framework, though a worker service is not limited to just windows. If you are building a worker service, then more than likely you will need to be able to write log data, be that general information of the worker services or perhaps just errors. If you plan to use Serilog, then this post will show you how to configure Serilog on a worker project. ...