TLDR; You can build simple, easy to maintain, modern interactive web experiences using ASP.NET Core, Razor, and HTMX. Adding interactive (client side) charts is possible by leveraging HTMX's extensibility mechanisms to bridge the world of HTMX Hypermedia and Chart.js requirements for RESTful JSON APIs. You can leverage HATEOAS to provide stateful links to self, previous, and next pages of data, which can also be used to enable/disable pagination buttons. The full source code is available on GitHub Technical Entropy We have a number of internal Line of Business applications which we've built si ..read more

In Episode #99 of the Real-World Serverless podcast, Yan Cui chats to Microsoft MVP, Ian Griffiths and take a deep dive into Azure Functions, how it works and how it differs (significantly) from AWS Lambda ..read more

TLDR; Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) are a simple markdown based document for capturing the context, options, decision, and consequences of a decision. dotnet-adr is a .NET global tool for creating and managing ADRs. It allows you to create ADRs using a variety of templates, and to manage the ADRs in your repo. It's designed to be simple, flexible, and customisable. ADRs have made a huge positive impact to our software and data engineering processes, and we wholeheartedly recommend you adopt them too. You can install dotnet adr with the following command: dotnet tool install -g adr Make ..read more

Something has happened over the last 10 years: business has started to view "data" as the engine of change. In the 1980s and 1990s "information technology" and "the micro on every desktop" held that position. Over 10-15 years "the IT department" evolved methodologies for providing and managing those services more efficiently (with varying degrees of success!). Today, we have automated, virtualized infrastructure (often provided by mega-vendors in "the Cloud"). Instead of provisioning hardware, we have Bring-Your-Own-Device policies (from laptops to smartphones). Working-from-home has taken fac ..read more

For the third year in a row I attended SQLbits - the largest expert led data conference in Europe. This time the journey took me from Scotland to the exhibition centre in Farnborough in Hampshire, South West of London. Farnborough has a long association with aviation, and hosts a world renowned international air show every year. SQLbits took advantage of the massive exhibition space which is on offer at Farnborough. As you would expect, the theme for the conference this year was aviation, and it was embraced throughout the conference by the vendors, in the various sessions and in the after pa ..read more

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx.NET) is profoundly useful, and developers often end up loving. Why is that? Endjin Technical Fellow Ian Griffiths explains how Rx.NET's deep roots in mathematical foundations make it both powerful and beautiful. To learn more about Rx.NET, check out the free book Introduction to Rx.NET 2nd Edition (2024). Ian Griffiths Hi, I'm Ian Griffiths, Technical Fellow at endjin. Back at the start of 2023, endjin took over as primary maintainers of the Reactive Extensions for .NET, usually known as Rx.NET, an open source .NET project for event driven programming. In this ..read more

At endjin we have been working in the Power BI space for a number of years. We're continually looking to customize our report design through themes, branding, and data visualization to give the UI a unique look and feel. In this post we are going to overlay UX practices and build on them and make reporting look more considered and intentional. We need to build stories and journeys into our reporting because data has a story. It’s about exposing and surfacing these topics and meaningful outcomes from the data we are presenting. One way to add formal UX practices is by integrating navigation. T ..read more

When you export a table from Dataverse into Synapse using the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse, the multi-select choice columns in your linked tables will display a list of numerical choice values. This isn't very meaningful to the end-user, what we really want to display in our choice columns is the associated text choice labels. This blog post explains how to access the multi-select choice column choice labels from Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse using PySpark, Spark SQL or T-SQL through SQL Serverless. Multi-select choice columns in Dataverse A multi-select choice column, is a type of colu ..read more

Notebooks are an incredibly flexible and useful part of Synapse (and other similar data platforms). They are great for getting started with exploring new datasets, as well as providing maximum flexibility when processing and analyzing data. As a result, it's quite common for a notebook to evolve from that initial exploratory code to be part of a productionised data processing pipeline. During the process of productionisation, it's necessary to ensure that errors in production can be effectively diagnosed. Depending on the complexity of the notebook, this might be simple - if it fails, you can ..read more

TLDR; Much like how DIY tools empower individuals to undertake home improvements without professional intervention, No-code/Low-code platforms aim to democratise the process of building software, empowering users without the need for extensive coding expertise. They can be incredibly powerful and may be a perfect fit for your needs, but before you dive in to embrace these platforms fully it's important to understand the broader context of software engineering. For example, critical factors such as testing, security and regulations can often be an afterthought in this type of tooling, so it's i ..read more