This blog has been left untouched since it was created 5 years ago, but now, thanks to the push from Umbraco and their migration to a new cloud infrastructure I was forced to do a long-overdue upgrade. Now, this blog is running on the latest and greatest Umbraco v8.17 and Articulate 4.3. Migration was "interesting": I didn't want to just use the BlogML export and import for the fear of losing some information (like tags, cover images and most importantly changing URLs), so I started with the recommended migration path Umbraco 7.5 to 7.6 and Articulate 2 to 3 Umbraco 7.6 to 7.15 Umbraco 7.15 t ..read more

Uninstalling old versions of .NET Core used to be a tedious process, so much that I had 1.0 and previews of 2.0 still installed. But now it's super easy thanks to the newly released .NET Core Uninstall Tool. TL;DR: Just install the tool, and launch the following command to remove all that is not needed. sudo ./dotnet-core-uninstall remove --runtime --all sudo ./dotnet-core-uninstall remove --sdk --all But if you want to understand more, please keep on reading. See which version you have installed If you run the following command on your terminal you can see all the runtimes and SDKs installe ..read more

Today I wanted to add MiniProfiler to an ASP.NET MVC web application (not .NET Core), but unfortunately the NuGet package doesn't set up things correctly, the documentation is a bit lacking, and their sample project doesn't work. What was supposedly a simple task, took almost a full day of research to make it work. In this post, I'm going to explain in 7 easy steps how to install MiniProfiler on an empty ASP.NET MVC web application. Step 1 - Create an ASP.NET MVC application To keep things easy, let's start with creating a new ASP.NET MVC application. Step 2 - Install the MiniProfiler.MVC5 N ..read more

In the context of my Ray Tracer Challenge, I wanted to run some performance analysis on my basic operations and data structures. For this installed and used BenchmarkDotNet, an OSS benchmarking tool used by Microsoft for performance testing the .NET Core runtime and class library. In this post, I'm going to share what I learned about this powerful tool. How to install BenchmarkDotNet BenchmarkDotNet is not an application you have to install. It is a .NET library. To install it, create a console application and install the NuGet package. dotnet new console dotnet add package BenchmarkDotNet A ..read more

The eBook on ASP.NET Core 2 I wrote together with Ugo Lattanzi is available for download for free from the Free Ebooks section of Syncfusion Tech Portal. In April 2017, Ugo Lattanzi and I published ASP.NET Core Succinctly, and it became one of the most downloaded ebook for 2017 and was also 2017 Succinctly Readers Awards Silver Winner, among all the 33 books released by Succinctly in 2017. This year we published an update to the book. All code and explanation have been adapted and updated to cover version 2.2 of ASP.NET Core, and also we added features that were not available before like: He ..read more

In the previous post, I've shown how I implemented chapter 1 of the Ray Tracing Challenge book, coding the basic primitives and their operations. And also implemented a ballistic trajectory calculator. In chapter 2, the goal is to be able to draw an image on a canvas and then saving it to a file. If you didn't, I recommend you read my introductory post which explains what I'm trying to achieve and why. Challenges encountered This was a more straightforward exercise than the one in the previous chapter, but still, not everything was simple. Modeling the Color class The concept behind drawing im ..read more

After setting up the project, in this post I start implementing the code for the first chapter of the Ray tracing challenge book, which focuses mostly on defining primitives (Point and Vectors), and vector algebra operations like addition, subtraction and also dot and cross products. And a simple ballistic problem to put all the operations in practice. If you want to know more, you can read the motivations about this "challenge" in my introductory post. Challenges encountered At first, it looked a simple task: how hard could it be to write some methods to perform simple addition, subtractions ..read more

Here it comes, the first post of my journey developing a Ray Tracer using .NET Core on a Mac, using only VS Code. If you didn't, I recommend you read my introductory post which explains what I'm trying to achieve and why. In this first post I'll talk about the libraries and tools I decided to use, and how I setup the project structure using the dotnet CLI. Tools used The only two tools I'm using are VS Code and the dotnet CLI. Let's see how I configured the two. VS Code As I mentioned in the introduction to this series of posts, I'm using VS Code, with the basic C#/Omnisharp extension that com ..read more

It's now a few days after Codegarden, and after resting a bit, I can sit down, look back and draw some conclusions. Codegarden 19 This was my 7th Codegarden, but in a sense, it was my toughest. I was in a very bad mood when I arrived. It was due to many reasons, work-related, personal and even related to the community. It was so bad that the day before leaving I was even considering not going at all. When I arrived I was grumpy, easily irritable, but then everything changed, even just after the pre-party. The people there were so friendly, everyone understood how I was feeling and the mood sta ..read more

I just bought the book The Ray Tracer Challenge - A Test-Driven Guide to Your First 3D Renderer and in the upcoming months, I'll be developing my own ray tracer, in .NET Core. I will also document my learning experience on the blog, for me, to keep track of my progress, and maybe discuss some implementation decisions with you, my readers, but also to share what I learn in the process. Why am I doing it Nowadays I spend most of my time building CMS-based projects, using APIs provided by vendors, and aggregating results coming from Cloud-based services. And I stopped enjoying development. I need ..read more