Adventures of a Code Thaumaturgist

Here I go again... I was following along with the Pluralsight course " Building a Web App with ASP.NET Core, MVC 6, EF Core, and Angular " but couldn't get the first demo app to run. I was stuck in Section 2 - Visual Studio! Bummer! I created a new ASP.Net Core app from scratch and tried to run it out of the box and got the error you see at right. I had zero luck finding a solution online. I searched through the code and the only place I found where there was a "type" property that was likely to be null (it's actually a string value in the file) was in the [app].vs\config\applicationhost.config file: <configuration> ... <configProtectedData>         <providers>             <add name="IISWASOnlyRsaProvider" type="" description="Uses RsaCryptoServiceProvider to encrypt and decrypt" keyContainerName="iisWasKey" cspProviderName="" useMachineContainer="true" useOAEP=...

A New Brain Yesterday at work we got a new employee whom I'll call Neesha. Actually, she came onboard a couple of days earlier but I was out due to surgery my wife needed. Neesha was brought on to work on a side project in my unit. I was very pleased to have someone to talk to about more modern software development technologies. She even suggested that the side project might be suitable to use ASP.Net Core and AngularJS . How cool! Not only was she looking at new technologies (well, new compared to what our mainly Classic ASP shop implements or even considers), but she qualified the considerations with statements along the lines of "if the technologies are suitable for the application and it's requirements"! A thinker! Woo hoo! Some Early Thoughts  I told her I wasn't very familiar with Core or Angular - I'd only had some passing exposure to it in the past few months. I told her that I'd spend some time this weekend looking at some Pluralsight...

Get On Board! As I may have mentioned, I'm an old programmer. When I went to college I learned a bit about testing my own software but it wasn't emphasized. At least not in the classes I took in the early 1980's. Somewhere along the line I started hearing about Test Driven Design but I'll admit, I don't remember when or where. "Uncle" Bob Martin at Software Craftsmanship In my latest spurt of actually studying software development, one of the sources I've been watching quite a bit on YouTube is "Uncle" Bob Martin. For younger software developers, his name may be more familiar than it is/was to me. Here's an example video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkblc5WRn-U . There are a good number of Uncle Bob videos where he discusses TDD; he's one of those (or is the one) that developed the idea of TDD. Basically, TDD from Bob's perspective means you write a test and run it. It will fail, naturally. Then you write the cod...