Welcome to the landmark 20th edition of The Catch Block!
In this edition: a brand new design (with search!), guest writers, Mobile Blazor, overengineering, concise vs clean, and the ultimate home office.
Check Out the Brand New Design!
As I am prone to doing every so often, late last week I redesigned the main site! It now looks like this:
To be perfectly frank, I had modified the previous design (itself a fork of Ghost's Lyra theme) so many times that I was beginning to break things whenever I tried to make some improvements, and it got to a point where I was better off starting over entirely. Hence, a brand-new design with a brand-new theme!
This new design includes several neat features, and first and foremost among them is a working search page! Clicking on the magnifying glass (upper-right corner) shows a search page with suggestions and a text field, and the field can now actually search my posts!
The new design also places my "pinned" or featured posts right at the top of the page, and makes better use of the header images. Plus, the redesigned Authors page looks AMAZING!
Still Looking for Guest Writers!
Speaking of which: I'm still looking for Guest Writers! If you've ever wanted to write a blog post but dunno how to get started, check out my Guest Writer Program. You write a post about any technical topic, I'll help you edit it and improve your "writing voice" and I'll host the post on Exception Not Found! You can even cross-host the post on your own website and I'll make your post the canonical one.
If you want to get started as a Guest Writer, email me at exceptionnotfound1 at gmail dot com.
Previews and Announcements
- Announcing .NET 5.0 Preview 7 (Richard Lander)
- ASP.NET Core Updates in .NET 5 Preview 7 (Sourabh Shirhatti)
- Announcing Entity Framework Core EF Core 5.0 Preview 7 (Jeremy Likness)
- Hybrid Blazor apps in the Mobile Blazor Bindings July update (Eilon Lipton)
Quality Reads
- Concise Code Isn't Always Clean Code – and Here's Why (Kenny Dubroff)
- Sorting in Blazor WebAssembly and ASP.NET Core Web API (Marinko Spasojevic)
- Why It's OK to Over-engineer Your Blog (Colby Fayock) - Oh thank goodness, I was getting worried there for a minute. :)
- Optimizing JS Interop in a Blazor WebAssembly application (Gérald Barré)
- Calling Generic Methods from Non-Generic Code in .Net (Jeremy Miller)
- Look Behind the IQueryable Curtain (Jeremy Likness) - I believe this is the first time a single writer has gotten two articles from different sites into the same The Catch Block issue!
- It’s Not About Doing Things Perfectly (J.D. Meier) - Includes one of my favorite quotes: "The best is the enemy of the good."
- Building the Ultimate Home Office (Again) (Troy Hunt) - Man I wish I had the space for this.
Catch Up with the Previous Issue!
Matthew Jones
Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!
