Practical takes on .NET, AI, cloud architecture, and the craft of building software — from someone who's been in the trenches for over 25 years and still finds it interesting. Includes posts from Trailhead Technology Partners.
In this blog, I want to show you how I built something I estimated would take me 20-60 hours of work in about half a day. This included a React frontend, .NET Azure Functions backend APIs, Azure Static Web Apps, Terraform infrastructure, live CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, a...
Read on Trailhead →I’m currently a 12-time recipient of the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. The Microsoft MVP award is something Microsoft grants annually to individuals in the software community who are experts and actively share that expertise with the world. This can include...
Read on Trailhead →As a software consultant, I’ve noticed a pattern play out at nearly every client over the last year. A team adopts Cursor or Claude Code or Copilot and their productivity, especially on greenfield tasks, jumps noticeably. And then, someone asks: “If the AI can do this, what ar...
Read on Trailhead →It seems like everyone is doing AI-assisted development these days. For a lot of people, it feels like magic: you ask for a thing, and suddenly you have that thing, even if you have no idea how to make that thing yourself. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need. Other times it...
Read on Trailhead →Building a cross-platform app usually starts with a deceptively simple goal: one team, one codebase, multiple targets. The reality is that your framework choice shapes everything from the UI architecture, to the delivery speed, testing strategy, hiring, and how much “platform ...
Read on Trailhead →Microsoft has announced that starting January 2026, the C# Dev Kit and C# VS Code extension will no longer support development using the .NET 6 and .NET 7 SDKs. In the blog post below, I’ll walk you through what teams running these versions of .NET in production need to know. ...
Read on Trailhead →Many organizations today are looking to integrate AI into their existing infrastructure without completely rewriting everything. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the process of adding MCP (Model Context Protocol) capabilities to your current REST APIs built in .NET, en...
Read on Trailhead →We started Trailhead ten years ago with a simple promise: to make custom software project more predictable and less risky. Along the way we turned that promise into The Trailhead Process™. If your technology initiatives ever feel ambiguous and risky, keep reading to find out h...
Read on Trailhead →Every year, .NET Conf brings developers from around the world together to celebrate what’s new, what’s next, and what’s possible with .NET. This year’s event, .NET Conf 2025, runs November 11 ‐ 13 and marks the arrival of .NET 10, a major milestone for developers building mode...
Read on Trailhead →If you spend any time in technology circles these days, or even just scroll LinkedIn for five minutes, you might think AI has already solved every problem humanity has ever faced. There is a lot of talk about the “future of intelligence,” vague promises of replacing entire job...
Read on Trailhead →Once upon a time, in a land not so far from production, there lived a growing kingdom of buttons, forms, and other UI components. What began as a peaceful realm of components slowly turned into a tangled forest of inconsistencies—every team member building their own version of...
Read on Trailhead →Everyone seems to be chasing microservices these days—promises of independent teams, targeted scaling, and fault isolation make them sound irresistible. It’s been said you should only reach for microservices if you have a really good reason to do so. Otherwise, you risk over‑e...
Read on Trailhead →Recently, I was reflecting on Large Language Models (LLMs) and how they contain all or much of the knowledge of the internet in a much smaller storeage space. For example, the ChatGPT 4 model is about 570 GB, a size almost anyone could store on their own computer’s storage. Wh...
Read on Trailhead →Distributed systems are all the rage right now—and for good reason. Many organizations are successfully turning to distributed architectures like microservices to meet their modern scalability and maintainability challenges. However, like every technology, distributed systems ...
Read on Trailhead →In a previous blog post, I showed how you can speed up .NET APIs using Redis to cache frequently-accessed and infrequently-changing data. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it provides a solid foundation on how Redis can dramatically improve API performance. In this post, I wa...
Read on Trailhead →Trailhead Technology Partners is excited to welcome Mark Adams as a new partner. With decades of leadership experience and a passion for strong client relationships, Mark is an excellent addition to our team. Mark has more than two decades of experience leading enterprise solu...
Read on Trailhead →Legacy systems are the backbone of countless organizations. Yet, as technology advances, these systems often become roadblocks, riddled with challenges like technical debt, undocumented workflows, brittle integrations, and limited scalability. Modernizing them is critical—but ...
Read on Trailhead →Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a critical practice for managing cloud infrastructure efficiently. But what happens if you already have a large set of Azure resources and want to manage them using Terraform? You can manually reverse-engineering those existing resources into Te...
Read on Trailhead →.NET 9 was released in November 2024 at .NET Conf. It introduces a wealth of new features and improvements that make it easier than ever to build high-performance, modern applications across platforms. Microsoft covered many different new features, but there was a definite foc...
Read on Trailhead →Caching plays a crucial role in performance in web applications by reducing strain on backend systems. The new HybridCache library, available in preview in .NET 9, simplifies caching and addresses some limitations of previous approaches, making it easier for developers to impl...
Read on Trailhead →Selecting the right tech stack can be a make-or-break decision for many projects. While some applications benefit from a complex stack, many others can thrive with a simpler, more streamlined setup. Choosing a lighter stack doesn’t just cut costs—it can improve development spe...
Read on Trailhead →Recently, Trailhead partner Jonathan “J.” Tower had the pleasure of discussing the topic of building a trusted software agency on Cory House‘s House of Code podcast. Together, they delved into what it takes to run a successful software agency, from hiring the right team to dev...
Read on Trailhead →ASP.NET Web Forms has been a cornerstone of a lot of enterprise web development for the last two decades. However, in 2019 Microsoft made it clear that all of their new development will focus on ASP.NET Core and modern .NET (formerly known as .NET Core), and that .NET Framewor...
Read on Trailhead →Machine learning (ML) is transforming industries by enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions, personalize user experiences, and improve operational efficiency. But for many organizations, the thought of adding ML capabilities to their products comes with the assumptio...
Read on Trailhead →We regularly test the functional requirements of our applications, but what about the architectural requirements like scalability, maintainability, and quality? Because these are harder to measure, we’re must less likely to be testing these aspects of our applications. In this...
Read on Trailhead →Have you ever maintained a software application where a change to one feature almost always broke another feature elsewhere in the application? Or have you ever tried to make a simple change to your software only to realize that it required you to update 10 or more files to ac...
Read on Trailhead →In software projects, making informed and consistent architectural decisions over the long-haul is crucial to creating and maintaining good software. However, without proper documentation and a structured approach to these architectural decisions, they can quickly be lost to t...
Read on Trailhead →In this post, I’ll be diving deep into the world of hybrid mobile app development, pitting three of the most popular frameworks against each other: Ionic, React Native, and Flutter. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to expand your toolkit or a business owner seeking ...
Read on Trailhead →In recent years, serverless architecture has emerged as a game-changer, promising scalability, cost-efficiency, and ease of deployment. However, amidst the hype surrounding serverless, it’s crucial to recognize that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. In this article, I del...
Read on Trailhead →Recently, Trailhead’s very own Jonathan “J.” Tower was at NDC Sydney, and sat down with Matt Wicks from SSW TV to discuss YARP: Your Gateway to Effortless Project Migrations. During this insightful conversation, J. walks Matt through Microsoft’s reverse proxy, YARP, and how us...
Read on Trailhead →Cryptographic algorithms hide behind the curtain of so much of the digital communication that supports our daily lives online. As quantum computers continue to advance, the likelihood increases of computers that can defeat all of our current cryptography algorithms, threatenin...
Read on Trailhead →At Trailhead, we understand that a successful business will often need to have a variety of software systems, leading to disparate systems that don’t always talk to each other. This demands a seamless way to connect those systems to avoid out-of-date data and dual data entry t...
Read on Trailhead →Many C# and .NET developers are grappling with aging ASP.NET projects still running on the .NET Framework. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Many of us have invested heavily in these applications, so the prospect of a full-scale upgrade can seem overwhelming. You might have you...
Read on Trailhead →In the early days of the .NET Framework, releases were infrequent and timed with Windows releases. The shift to an open-source platform brought a welcome change. Now, we anticipate an annual .NET release tied to the .NET Conf event every November. Building on the foundation of...
Read on Trailhead →At Trailhead Technology Partners, we understand that in the fast-paced world of technology, every business must continuously innovate and evolve. However, in the quest for rapid development, there’s a lurking challenge that can impede progress: Technical Debt. What Is Technica...
Read on Trailhead →In the fast-paced world of software development, brevity is often hailed as a virtue. Software engineers, with their affinity for efficiency, are notorious for distilling complex concepts into succinct messages–sometimes even a little too succinct. While the skill of summarizi...
Read on Trailhead →In the quickly evolving landscape of software, keeping pace with advancements is crucial to avoid having your application become a dreaded “legacy” application. Recently, Trailhead’s very own Jonathan “J.” Tower had the privilege of being a featured guest on The Azure DevOps P...
Read on Trailhead →In October 2022, Microsoft announced that Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms apps will no longer be supported after May 1, 2024, which is just eight months from the writing of this post. The reason for this deadline is that Xamarin is being replaced by its successor technology, .NET MA...
Read on Trailhead →In this blog, I want to dive into a debate that is happening in software teams all over the world right now as I write this sentence: Should we use GitHub or Azure DevOps for our source control, team collaboration, and DevOps? At Trailhead, we understand the significance of ch...
Read on Trailhead →In this blog, I want to shine a light on the practical benefits that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) brings to software development projects. I’ll show you how defining our applications’ infrastructure needs in the form of code can more easily automate provisioning, achieve consi...
Read on Trailhead →Everyone is talking about containers and serverless, but when should you use each in your projects? Anyone who has worked with containers and orchestration much will tell you how much more complex they can make your application’s infrastructure. But the cloud keeps abstracting...
Read on Trailhead →When you’re using a shell command, it’s common to pass options to that command using dashes—which are also called hyphens. These options can be specified with either a single dash (-) or a double dash (—). But have you ever wondered when to use one or the other: a single dash ...
Read on Trailhead →Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel Recently, a legacy ASP.NET Web API application that we support started logging an exception and also giving back a HTTP 500 response on some of its API endpoints. The exception, or at least an inner exception within it, was: System.Net...
Read on Trailhead →It can be difficult to choose a development stack for your custom mobile apps today due to the number of possibilities currently available. Though there are many options, each of them falls into one of three basic categories: native, cross-platform, or hybrid mobile app develo...
Read on Trailhead →Just like venturing into the wilderness requires the proper gear, developing REST APIs with ASP.NET Core also requires the right tools and equipment for your application to perform at its best. At Trailhead, Redis caching is one such tool that’s always in our backpack. What I...
Read on Trailhead →What’s the big deal about file uploads? Well, the big deal is that they are tricky operations. Implement file uploads the wrong way, and you may end up with memory leaks, server slowdowns, out-of-memory errors, and worst of all, unhappy users. With Azure Blob Storage, there a...
Read on Trailhead →Most C# developers have of heard of .NET MAUI by now, but maybe not everyone knows exactly what it is, why it’s so important, and how to get started using it. That’s why we are so proud of our teammate Rodrigo Juarez for co-authoring a book on this topic alongside Trailhead’s ...
Read on Trailhead →One of the oldest debates for businesses that use software is the question of “buy versus build.” On the one hand, you have off-the-shelf or software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings which are tried and true and spread the cost for their development across hundreds or even thous...
Read on Trailhead →At Trailhead Technology Partners, we often help our customers navigate the complex world of migrating custom software applications to the cloud. For anyone thinking about undertaking such a project, I’ve outlined the whys and hows of Trailhead’s migration process below. I hope...
Read on Trailhead →For the first time in many years, the public has recently become aware of artificial intelligence (AI) again after OpenAI released their much-publicized chatbot, ChatGPT. Something about its uncanny intelligence and human-like fluency captured people’s imaginations, and maybe ...
Read on Trailhead →This article is part of C# Advent 2022. During the month of December, two new articles are posted each day until December 25th. These articles will be about something in the C# language, and are written by experts from around the C# community. Trailhead is proud to be a part o...
Read on Trailhead →With the recent release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a powerful chatbot trained on a massive amount of internet data, many people are wondering whether they should be worried about the implications of this technology. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at ChatGPT and explore ...
Read on Trailhead →At Trailhead, we think that .NET is the world’s most powerful and flexible framework for custom development. That’s why we are so excited that .NET 7 was officially released this week. When you see what’s new in .NET 7, we think you will agree that it moves the platform forwar...
Read on Trailhead →Building custom business software is difficult. In my two-and-a-half decades of experience in the industry, I’ve seen many different mistakes that contributed to custom software development projects being late or even failing. As I’ve worked with hundreds of different teams in...
Read on Trailhead →The world of cross-platform app development is undergoing a major revolution right now thanks to .NET MAUI—the next evolution of Xamarin.Forms. Using .NET MAUI, developers can build a single project and compile it into native code and native UI components running on a broad a...
Read on Trailhead →A lot is being said these days about microservices. It’s enough of a popular trend online, at conferences, and in software architect chit-chat, that one could easily get the idea that microservices are always the superior architecture to the alternatives. In fact, even the com...
Read on Trailhead →I recently upgraded a project to .NET 6 and immediately started getting an error on your hosted build pipeline in Azure DevOps. Error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET 6.0. Either target .NET 5.0 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that su...
Read on Trailhead →I learned a lot in college that is applicable to my life and career…and some of it was even in my classes. Nowhere was that more true than with my time doing comedy improvisation. At the beginning of my sophomore year in college, I tried out for an improv group called the Rice...
Read on Trailhead →Microsoft Build 2021 just wrapped up, and a lot of the new coverage was about things like the upcoming major updates to Windows, the retirement of IE and pre-Chromium Edge, and the new Windows app store that is being developed. However, this year’s event also included some ver...
Read on Trailhead →I finally have a time-tracking process that I love, and it only took me 22 years of trial and error to figure it out. With how often I hear others complain about tracking their time, I figured I needed to share this big news with the whole world. Consulting businesses like Tra...
Read on Trailhead →Software projects are notoriously difficult to estimate accurately. After years of building successful custom software projects, I’ve learned a lot of helpful DOs and DON’Ts for creating accurate estimates and had the opportunity to test those rules over hundreds of software p...
Read on Trailhead →We were inspired recently when Microsoft announced that it was going carbon neutral by 2030, and completely paying back its historic carbon debt by 2040. Amazon has also made the similar, though slightly less lofty pledge to be carbon neutral by the year 2040. As vendors to Tr...
Read on Trailhead →When you’re using a shell command, it’s common to pass options to that command using dashes–which are also called hyphens. These options can be specified with either a single dash (-) or a double dash (–). But have you ever wondered when to use one or the other: a single dash ...
Read on Trailhead →Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel Recently, a legacy ASP.NET Web API application that we support started logging an exception and also giving back a HTTP 500 response on some of its API endpoints. The exception, or at least an inner exception within it, was: System.Net.W...
Read on Trailhead →I’ve been working remotely–or telecommuting, as it is often known–for nearly 10 years, and in that time I’ve learned a few DOs and DON’Ts for being a successful remote worker. I’m far from perfect, and am still learning and getting it wrong at times, but I wanted to share some...
Read on Trailhead →When I talk to .NET developers, I find that there’s still a lot of confusion about what .NET Standard is and how it relates to .NET Core. In fact, this weekend I’ll be giving a talk at the Music City Tech conference in Nashville, Tennessee about just that. I thought I’d share ...
Read on Trailhead →UPDATE, 2018 May 30: It’s alive. The dotnet team officially announces 2.1 on their blog! The newest version of ASP.NET Core will be released in just a few days, the team announced this week. They’re targeting Wednesday, May 30, 2018, with an early-access release available alre...
Read on Trailhead →At Trailhead, we’ve recently been noticing an increase in a couple of questions from our clients. They are: 1. Is Web Forms dead?, and 2. Is ASP.NET still a good framework to use to build a new application? First off, there is some confusion about the difference between ASP.NE...
Read on Trailhead →Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says “bots are the new apps.” If that’s the case, then developers are going to need a cross-platform way to build those bots, just like they have cross-platform frameworks for building mobile app. Good news, because Microsoft has built just such a f...
Read on Trailhead →At Trailhead, we’ve been making the switch from Angular 1 to Angular 2 for our new web front-end projects. The selection of tools and components for Angular 2 has been slowly expanding, but it is still young and somewhat limited at times, which is why we’ve been very excitedly...
Read on Trailhead →Trailhead Technology Partners is very pleased to announce the addition of our newest partner, Josh Eastburn. Current partners, J. and John, give their thoughts about the expanded partnership below, and welcome Josh to the team. Josh also shares a few of his thoughts about join...
Read on Trailhead →In this Edition Introducing ASP.NET Core 1.0 Trailhead’s Experience with .NET Core Our ASP.NET Core services: “ASP.NET Core” Online Training > Consulting Services > Introducing: ASP.NET Core 1.0 On June 27, Microsoft announced the official release of ASP.NET Core 1.0. Have y...
Read on Trailhead →Microsoft’s Build conference kicked off today in San Francisco. The keynote provided a snapshot of how Microsoft is going to double-down on its previous commitment to open source, cross-platform, and helping developers create amazing experiences. Though some if it may seem sho...
Read on Trailhead →Perhaps you’e read the news last week from Scott Hanselman already, but if you haven’t, allow me to bring you up to speed. ASP.NET 5 is now know as ASP.NET Core 1.0. Note that this name change does no
Read more →I often find myself writing logic to compare two date ranges to see if they overlap. In fact, I’ve done this enough times that I thought it was worth capturing in a blog post to save myself the time o
Read more →J. Tower About a year-and-a-half ago, I had a dream of starting a company with several of my favorite friends and colleagues, and today that dream is starting to come true. Please allow me to introduce Trailhead Technology Partners. Trailhead is a custom software consulting co...
Read on Trailhead →I had an excellent time presenting a talk today at Detroit DevDay in Detroit, MI. I spoke about “ASP.NET 5: Someone Moved Your Cheese”. Thanks to everyone that came to my talk and to the organizers fo
Read more →I had an excellent time presenting two talks this morning at the Milwaukee CodeCamp in Milwaukee, WI. I spoke about “Model-View-Whatever: Comparing JavaScript MVC/MVP/MVVM Frameworks” and “ASP.NET 5:
Read more →This post is part 2 of a series: 1. New ASP.NET 5 Project from Scratch with Visual Studio 2015 – Part 1 2. New ASP.NET 5 Project from Scratch with Visual Studio 2015 – Part 2 (this one)
Read more →This post is part 1 of a series: 1. New ASP.NET 5 Project from Scratch with Visual Studio 2015 – Part 1 (this one) 2. New ASP.NET 5 Project from Scratch with Visual Studio 2015 – Part 2
Read more →With the shutdown of INETA North America coming later this year, I decided to start creating my own map of active conferences, user groups, and meetups. I planned to eventually add event dates, speake
Read more →I had an excellent time last night at the Northern NJ .NET User Group in Parsippany, NJ. I spoke about “Taking Control of Your ORM with Entity Framework Code-First”. Thanks to everyone that came out a
Read more →Did you know the Team Explorer splits into separate panes? It does, and it’s great for productivity. Read on and I’ll show you how to do it…
Read more →I had an excellent time tonight at the New York ALT.NET Meetup in New York, NY. I spoke about “Taking Control of Your ORM with Entity Framework Code-First”. Thanks to everyone that came out, Microsoft
Read more →Thank you to everyone that came to my talk last night at Tech Talk DC, and thanks to the hosts for putting the evening together. I enjoyed our time together and my conversations with those of you I sp
Read more →I had fun last night speaking at New River Valley .NET User Group in Blacksburg, VA. I gave my “30 Tools for Modern .NET Web Development” talk, one of my favorites to give. Thanks to everyone that cam
Read more →I first installed the Batarang plugin for Chrome a couple of years ago as a way to debug AngularJS apps. It worked great, and I never looked back–until recently, that is. In the last few months, the
Read more →I had an excellent time tonight at Louisville .NET Meetup in Louisville, KY. I spoke about using “30 Tools for Modern .NET Web Development”, one of my favorite talks to give. Thanks to everyone that c
Read more →I had an excellent first visit to the Enterprise Developers Guild tonight in Charlotte, NC. I spoke about using Telerik’s Kendo UI library together with AngularJS. Thanks to everyone that came out, an
Read more →This Tuesday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the Enterprise Developers Guild in Charlotte, NC. The title of my presentation is “Kendo <3’s Angular: Two Great Libraries, Together At Last!“. [Event Detai
Read more →Occasionally you need to be able to run two instances of Visual Studio to debug two different web applications simultaneously. If these web applications are set up to run in IIS, you may get the follo
Read more →In ASP.NET, it can be helpful to know when a request is an AJAX call (made via XMLHttpRequest, that is) as apposed to a standard HTTP request. This can be detected with ASP.NET’s Request.IsAjaxRequest
Read more →Today I got the following error after setting a web site in IIS to use HTTPS/SSL and trying to start the site:
Read more →At the end of last year, Telerik unveiled their new “Developer Expert” program. According to Burke Holland, Developer Advocate at Telerik, “Telerik Developer Experts are those who have not only master
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