I finally, finally, finally converted my Blog to Angular modern…
Meh. Blow a party whistle. And I am far from “done,” by the way. I now understand why Scott Hanselman would stay with ASP.NET Web Forms and no SPA-action for his Blog. I have been dealing with this ‘challenge’ actively since the summer of 2017. These are challenges I set up for myself (not really understanding that each of these challenges had at least three challenges wrapped inside):
- maintain a private-sector day job (compared to a government or academic job)
- convert from Visual Studio web-building workflows to Visual Studio Code workflows
- convert my .NET 4.x investments to .NET Core in general and .NET Standard 2.0 in particular
- maintain a private-sector day job
- migrate from a few huge Team Foundation Server solutions to many, many Git repositories
- migrate to a Node.js based development culture
- migrate from Angular JS to Angular
- maintain a private-sector day job
- establish a Visual Studio Team Services CI/CD pipeline for multiple Git repositories
It is clear—abundantly clear—that I am not converting from Angular JS to Angular in a vacuum. I am converting multiple production pipelines over to a new paradigm as well as converting from Angular JS to Angular. This is the downside of being a developer with legacy load, struggling to stay out of technical debt.
many, many Git repositories
I will attempt to list the Git repositories I built for this mega-conversion in the proper chronological order to explain (even to myself) what the hell I was doing. Each of these repositories contain their own histories, detailing more of my joy and pain—and pain. It may help to mention that I have been using Team Foundation Services to host a few huge Team Foundation Server (TFS) solutions that I have been building up for over a decade. Most of these GitHub repositories draw from these TFS solutions:
SonghayCore: all my Blog sites have run on top this Core so this had to move first. My contributions show I started this process in the summer of 2016. It may help to mention that I use the assets in this repository for my day job.
Songhay.Cloud.BlobStorage: all of my MVC-era Blog sites have run on top Azure Storage, abstracted into a repository. My contributions show I started this process in the autumn of 2017. For the reader who would prefer to not get into this ‘trap’ I have set up for myself, it may help to mention that this month Microsoft has announced “Static website hosting for Azure Storage now in public preview” which should do well with a static website generator.
Songhay.Social: this repository supports the Tweeted Links posts, a Blog post made of Twitter statuses which has been totally dominating my Blog posting for the last few years. My contributions show I started this process in the winter of this year.
Songhay.Feeds: this repository is the solution to generating RSS feeds in a JSON format for UI display via a back-end Azure job. The RSS feed for my Blog is now broken as this is functionality is not running in the cloud as of this writing. My contributions show I started this process in the winter of this year.
dotnet-core: I started this repository in the fall of 2017 to teach myself .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. I am passionate about learning in public, demystifying this process for less experienced developers.
nodejs: I started this repository in the spring of 2017 to, as aforementioned, ‘migrate to a Node.js based development culture.’
angular.io-index-app: this repository represents my intention to standardize my studio around an Index app for SPA solutions. This Blog as of this writing is currently running off of a ‘seed’ based on this Index app. I started this repository in the autumn of 2017after experimenting with aurelia-index-app.
Songhay.Blog: as of this writing this repository is the engine behind this Blog site, started in the spring of 2018. It is quite intimidating (to me) to see that all of the repositories mentioned above made this repository possible.
Since I am clearly not as bright as Scott Hanselman, I have been laboring under the assumption that like a fictional Jedi I have to waste years of my real life trying to build my own light saber, using patterns and practices that both conform and deviate from the norm. The principle I am trying to uphold is simple but has been quite brutal (on me): my technical Blog should be built by me. When I started this Blog there was nothing in the ASP.NET MVC world for blogging on the scale of, say, WordPress. It follows quite naturally that I followed the example of Chris Fulstow and went out on my own… I do not recommend doing this. Today, I would recommend a static website generator. But do understand that I make this recommendation after learning about ASP.NET MVC by building my own Blog site(s).
Going forward my plan is to continue posting Tweeted Links—like my latest one as of this writing—and Blog posts detailing how I am finishing this Blog site. Writing about what I am doing motivates me to work—even when no one is reading about what I am writing. I understand this weird thing about myself so it has been quite uncomfortable to endure about three years without a technical blogging platform. I welcome myself back. I hope Bing search bots will index this thing correctly.