Early in my software engineering career, a senior engineer at Microsoft told me “the best solution is one that requires no new code.” At the time, I thought this was nonsense. Is not my role as a software engineer to write code? Why would writing less or no code be better? More code means more bug fixes, more features, more services, and more tools. So why is more not always better?

.NET Core applications contain a file named <something>.runtimeconfig.json. This file can be used to control a variety of options. Most developers need not be concerned with it because the SDK generates the file, but I think it’s worth understanding. The file can be used to control settings which are not surfaced in Visual Studio, such as automatically running your app on higher .NET Core versions, tuning thread pools and garbage collection, and more.

Shared frameworks have been an essential part of .NET Core since 1.0. ASP.NET Core shipped as a shared framework for the first time in 2.1. You may not have noticed if things are working smoothly, but there have been some bumps and ongoing discussion about its design. In this post, I will dive deep into the shared frameworks and talk about some common developer pitfalls.

I recently published a new package for .NET Core developers that want to implement a plugin system. Dynamic assembly loading in .NET Core is difficult to get right. The API in this package wrangles the complexity through a feature called ‘load contexts’. In this post, I’ll walk through problems that motivated the creation of this project, and explain what the API can do. My hope is that this plugin API will let you focus more on writing your app, and put an end to the inevitable mess of creating your own assembly loading code.

Recently, I spent a weekend banging my head against the wall as I tried to figure out how to upgrade a personal project to webpack 4, TypeScript 2.9, and React (used to be AngularJS 1.6). I finally got it all working together – and even got hot module replacement (hmr) working. TL;DR? Checkout the code here: https://github.com/natemcmaster/aspnetcore-webpack-hmr-demo

About 4 weeks ago, I decided to code sign the NuGet packages from my personal open-source projects. I finally succeeded this weekend. When I started, I figured it couldn’t be that hard. In the end, it really isn’t, but it took hours of research to figure out how to tie it all together. In this post, I’ll share the technical details of what it took to enable code signing using Azure Key Vault, AppVeyor, and NuGet for one of my .NET Core projects.

.NET Core 2.1 RC1 was released this week. This is the first supported version of the .NET Core CLI which ships dotnet watch as a built-in command. In addition to changing how this tool ships, dotnet-watch 2.1 has a few improvements that make it the best version yet.

.NET Core 2.1 RC1 was released this week. This is the first supported version of the .NET Core CLI which includes a feature called “.NET Core Global Tools”. This feature provides a simple way to create and share cross-platform console tools. In this post, I’ll go over some of the basics, and then walk though what is going on under the hood. You will need to download .NET Core 2.1 to use this to try this on your own.

I learned to program with gcc, C++, and vim. When I started working with C# and .NET, clicking the “Start” button in Visual Studio was magical, but also dissatisfying. Dissatisfying – not because I want to write a Makefile – but because I didn’t know what “Start” did. So, I started to dig. In this post, I’ll show the most primitive tools used in .NET Core, and manually create a .NET Core app without the help of Visual Studio. If you’re new to .NET Core and want to peek under the hood, this is a good post for you. If you’re already a .NET Core developer and wonder what *.deps.json or *.runtimeconfig.json files are all about, I’ll cover those, too.