jonblankenship

In my almost two decades as a developer I’ve become increasingly aware of what matters to me in a job, having been in half dozen different environments that excel in some traits but are lacking in others. This list is my list of the things that are most important to me in a dev job at this time in my life. This list changes with time as my circumstances and priorities change. This list is likely different than your list.

This weekend I came across some oddly formatted datetimes while playing around with Twitter webhooks. When it came time to test my API endpoint to receive the Twitter event, I received a 400 response with a message indicating that one of the date fields the JSON payload could not be deserialized into a DateTimeOffset. In this post I’ll demonstrate how to write a custom converter to solve this and similar JSON deserialization problems in an ASP.NET Core Web API.

Many applications have the need to send automated e-mails to users at certain times during processing. Razor templates combined with Azure Functions can be used to build a simple, maintainable, and loosely-coupled solution for sending transactional e-mails. This post will show you how to get it done.

Excepticon SDK for .NET

Today I’m pleased to announce the launch of Excepticon, an exception monitoring SaaS for .NET applications and services. Excepticon is easy to configure and simple to use, and it’s geared specifically towards .NET developers.

The specification pattern can be an indispensable tool in the developer's toolbox when faced with the task of determining whether an object meets a certain set of criteria. Coupled with the composite pattern, the composite specification becomes a power tool that can tackle any combination of business rules no matter how complex, all while ensuring maintainability, robustness, and testability. In this post we'll see how the specification pattern can be used to build a data-driven rules engine.