Getting started on MongoDb with .NET Core

Coming from a strictly relational db world, NoSql style databases have always seemed a bit scary! I recently had the opportunity to play around with MongoDb for the first time, and I was quite surprised by how easy it was to get started!

I was recently interviewed by GaProgMan for his show “The .NET Core Podcast”!

Episode 21 - Orleans with Russell Hammett

Quick update to a post I did a while back regarding Orleans Dashboard — additional reporting metrics for your cluster!

I’ve been using docker for playing around with my dinky website, but the DockerFile/image has always been a bit brute forcey. It’s time to explore a somewhat more effective DockerFile!

As we continue exploring Microsoft Orleans — the virtual actor model framework — we happen upon Observers. Observers can be used to “observe” events, in the form of notifications, as an example.

There are some differences in how one would host an Orleans server locally vs deployed in a production scenario. In this post, we’ll use some of the skills we’ve built on previously, to help us in our journey to hosting a production ready Orleans cluster.

GaProgMan tweeted recently about his A+ rating on securityHeaders.com. Checking my site, I could see there was room for improvement!

I’ve worked with MSTest and NUnit previously, but for whatever reason not with xUnit. Thankfully, coming from either framework seemed to translate pretty easily into xUnit.

Orleans is an actor model framework — a framework used for easily creating distributed systems across a cluster of machines. In this post we’ll explore the “Reminders” feature of Orleans.

Dependency Injection is an important part of writing loosely coupled, easily tested code. I’ve written a bit about it before, but not in the context of Microsoft Orleans.

Microsoft Orleans — Code Generation issue?

While working on the post “Microsoft Orleans — Reporting Dashboard”, I ran into an issue where code generation seemingly stopped “generating”.

Orleans is an easy to use actor framework, but how can you monitor your deployment? Luckily, there’s something simple to use — Orleans Dashboard!

Note this is not an Orleans post, not exactly — it’s just something I wanted to enhance on my Orleans Project, prior to moving on to demonstrating even more Orleans features!

We’ve explored Orleans for distributing application logic across a cluster. Next, we’ll be looking at grain reuse and grain state…

Have you ever had a LOT of projects in a solution, many of which use the same NuGet packages? Managing package versions could be a nightmare!

Orleans is an open source actor framework built by Microsoft research, and was used for halo cloud functionality! Here’s how to get started…

I’ve used letsencrypt in the past for free certs, but I have not successfully utilized it since moving over to docker/kestrel/nginx. That all changed today, and I had a hell of a time figuring out what I’m doing to get it working.

So, I’m losing faith in my google skills, there didn’t seem to be a one stop shop that I could find to give information on setting up a .net core console application with a IServiceProvider and utilizing IOptions<T>… so that brings us here.

I’m close to wrapping up my initial pass through the solar projection feature of the website. One of the final touches is the ability for visitors to run their own projections.

I published my first NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Kritner.SolarProjection/)! Kristen and I recently were considering (and have since financed) a 17,000 kw/year solar array, on the back of our house