Welcome to the sixth edition of The Catch Block!
In this edition: not alone, more CQRS, injection, refactoring, a game of Life, Hexo, a Strangler, and your blogging voice.
You Are Not Alone
"This situation sucks."
One of the blog posts that really stuck with me this week was written by Rion Williams. Titled "No, You Aren't Alone", he touches on why so many of us feel helpless, or depressed, or worried during this time of COVID-19 and quarantine.
He makes this specific point:
"As someone that has been working fully remote for several years I can easily say this is not what normal, fully remote work is like."
And this is the key point that I find I must remind myself of daily. This is not normal. We are not living in normal times. And it's okay to be not normal. It's okay to be stressed, or worried, or more snappish than you usually are. Trying to keep a cool head and focus on your work is far more difficult now. It's okay. This is not normal.
But it will become normal again. It will, though it doesn't seem like it now. We will go back to working in our normal environments, to our kids being at school and not missing it, to our loved ones being able to be in the same space as us. We will return to normalcy at some point, hopefully some point sooner than later. And when that happens, we will be glad of the measures we took now, that saved lives then.
I will admit, my personal situation is a bit more manageable than Rion's. My kids are 10, 10, and 7, able to clothe, feed, and entertain themselves for long periods of time. We still help them with their remote school and they need us to do many things for them, but it's not everything. It is difficult to imagine how my wife and I might have handled this if our kids were younger.
All that said, remember, it's okay to be not normal. You will be normal again. Let's hope that time gets here quickly.
Published on Exception Not Found
Guest writer Vladimir Vozar published a four-part series last week all about building a Hexo blog site and deploying it to GitHub Pages. The series begins with his post about installing a Hexo blog and adding a new theme. Please check it out, and let Vladimir know how he did!
Still Taking Applicants for the Guest Writer Program
Don't forget: I am always taking applications for this blog's Guest Writer Program. Ever wanted to write your own blog but don't feel like your writing skills are up to snuff? I'm here to help! Write a post for this blog about something technology related and I'll help you edit it and refine your "blogging voice".
Plus, all guest writers get a free subscription to the blog, so if you know someone who is looking for help with their writing, let them know!
Cool Reads
- A Fast and Lightweight Solution for CQRS and Event Sourcing (Daniel Miller) - This is a very long but useful demonstration of how to build a CQRS/ES solution from scratch. Somehow it manages to take the complex chart below and make it understandable.
- Why and Where Should You Use React For Web Development (Prayaag Kasundra) - As I've admitted before in this space, I'm not all caught up on front-end frameworks, so it's articles like this one that help me learn. This particular article takes a business-oriented approach to the justification of using React, so if you're in a position where you need to convince people above you to use a new front-end framework, and you'd like it to be React.js, this article will be very useful.
- Life, part 1 (Eric Lippert) - We lost mathematician John Horton Conway this last week to complications from COVID-19. Conway was most famous for his implementation of the "game of life" in which cells propagate and live or die depending on whether or not they have enough neighbors (this is a gross oversimplification). Eric is starting a series all about this model, and it's worth a read.
Releases, Announcements and Previews
- Visual Studio Code March 2020
- Bring Your Own Machine to Visual Studio Online (Allison Buchholtz-Au)
Other Neat Reads
- A Remote Work Guide for Parents (Ariel Rule)
- Domain Driven Design and Entity Framework Core - two years on (Jon P Smith)
- Injecting Services into ASP.NET Razor Views (Khalid Abuhakmeh)
- Stranging .NET Framework App to .NET Core (Kamil Grzybek) - Uses the Proxy and Facade design patterns to create a new pattern, the Strangler pattern.
- Global Exception Handling in ASP.NET Core Web API (Jon Blankenship)
- ASP.NET Core 5 - Enabling Razor runtime compilation (Talking Dotnet)
- Typing functions in Typescript (Axel Rauschmayer)
- Using Entity Framework in a Blazor Server Application (David Grace)
- .NET 5.0, VS2019 Preview and C# 9.0 for ASP .NET Core developers (Shahed Chowdhuri)
- Refactoring: This class is too large (Clare Sudbery)
- Using xUnit To Test Your C# Code (Andrea Chiarelli)
- Organizational Accounts for ASP.NET Core 3.1 (Shahed Chowdhuri)
Catch Up with the Previous Issue!
Matthew JonesThanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!
