Western Devs

James Chambers

An active member in the ASP.NET development community, James speaks at conferences, user groups and brown-bag lunches. Now a five-time Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET/IIS, he shares his programming experiences and knowledge with kids aged 9-14 through local school division programmes.

From a professional perspective his background includes projects in energy companies, telecommunications, sports entertainment and transportation as well as others. He has lead development teams in web & cloud-enabled applications as well as mobile and stand-alone desktop apps.

You can find James hammering away at his blog at www.jameschambers.com, digging in the secret tunnels of the Canadian Prairies, in articles on MSDN and occasionally appearing on Microsoft Virtual Academy as a presenter or community SME.

Blog posts

JAN

2017

ASP.NET Core Training in Calgary, Alberta
James Chambers

The first ASP.NET Monsters workshop is happening in Calgary from Feb 22-24, 2017. Attendance is mandatory

APR

2016

GitHub Authentication with ASP.NET Core
James Chambers

Authentication has changed over the years, and my take on it has surely shifted. No longer is it the scary, intimidating beastie that must be overcome on our projects. Today, we can let external providers provide the authentication mechanisms, giving the user with a streamlined experience that can give them access to our application with previuosly defined credentials. Let's have a look at what it takes to allow users to authenticate in our application using GitHub as the login source, and you can check out the Monsters video take of this on Channel 9.

FEB

2016

Tips for Speeding Up Visual Studio
James Chambers

People, this is 2016. If you're waiting on your project to build or feel like your IDE is sluggish, it's time to inventory and make sure you have the optimal configuraiton for development rig. Let's talk quickly about the things that make your machine go fast (or slow) and some simple tweaks that can get your builds moving along more quickly.

FEB

2016

Leaving Your Work at Work (When You Work From Home)
James Chambers

Finding success as a remote worker is pretty darn hard. Unless you're a complete natural, you will need to have the perfect combination of environment, corporate trust, family time and personal time. Failing being perfect, you can just take the route I took and try your best to follow a few practices that can help you disconnect at the end of the day.

JAN

2016

Strongly-Typed Configuration in ASP.NET Core MVC
James Chambers

Over the last two posts I worked through the basics of configuration in ASP.NET and how to leverage structured data in your JSON config files. Now it's time to take a deeper look at how to access relevant parts of your configuration throughout the rest of your project.

JAN

2016

JSON Configuration in ASP.NET Core MVC
James Chambers

Structured data in earlier versions of ASP.NET meant creating and registering custom types and configuration sections for our applications. In ASP.NET Core and in Core MVC, structured configuration is a breeze with support for JSON documents as the storage mechanism and the ability to flatten hierarchies into highly portable keys.

JAN

2016

Configuration in ASP.NET Core MVC
James Chambers

ASP.NET Core MVC introduces a new configuration system that adds flexibility and simultaneously enables cross-platform support (in a way that makes sense on other platforms). In this post we're going to cover the basics of configuration and what you can expect as you look at the project template from File -> New Project in Visual Studio 2015.

JAN

2016

Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft Band 2 Battery Life
James Chambers

Including tips on how to keep yours running all week long

JAN

2016

Your Work and Your Life are Not Intricately Intertwined
James Chambers

You are always setting expectations. When you answer an email at 10pm, you are setting an expectation. When let a call go to voicemail at 6pm, you are setting an expectation.

NOV

2015

The Humanitarian Toolbox AllReady Code-a-Thon
James Chambers

I was recently in Seattle for the MVP Summit, one of the best ways to connect to product teams and really smart people from around the world. Every year I get to meet more of the team that builds the tools I use daily, reconnect with peers and catch up with friends. And I eat at Magiano's. But this year, the MVP Summit was trumped in awesomeness as quickly at it came to a close as the very next morning the code-a-thon for the Humanitarian Toolbox kicked into high gear.

NOV

2015

ApiController in ASP.NET 5? Nopesauce
James Chambers

If you're developing in ASP.NET Web API you are familiar with the concept of inheriting from the base ApiController class. This class is still around in ASP.NET 5, but it is likely not meant for you to use. Here's why your cheese has moved.

SEP

2015

Supporting Options and Arguments in Your dnx Commands
James Chambers

Grab yourself your copy of Visual Studio 2015 and buckle up! Today we're going to create our own dnx command with support for options and arguments.

SEP

2015

Upgrading NPM in Visual Studio 2015
James Chambers

Visual Studio 2015 (download here) ships with it's own version of several external tools, such as grunt, node and npm. If you are wanting to take advantage of newer versions of these tools, you have three options:

AUG

2015

Writing Custom Commands for DNX With ASP.NET 5.0
James Chambers

If you are a developer on the .NET stack, you've now got access to a great new extension to your development environment. DNX, or the .NET Execution Environment, is a powerful new extensibility point that you can leverage to build project extensions, cross-platform utilities, build-time extensions and support for automation. In this article I'll walk you through the process of building your own custom DNX command on top of ASP.NET 5.0.

AUG

2015

Converting .NET 4.6 Projects to the VS 2015 Project System
James Chambers

To take advantage of multi-targeted outputs from our project – allowing our assemblies to be used from multiple frameworks across the organization – we want to upgrade our projects to use the new project system in Visual Studio 2015. Previously, we would have needed a base project and then a separate project for each framework target (PCL, 4.5, 3.5, 4.5.2, etc), but in today's solutions we can have a single project output all of the assets we wish to support.

JUL

2015

Launching an ASP.NET 5 Application From Visual Studio 2015
James Chambers

If you are trying to use any DNX (DotNet Execution) runtime other than dnx451 (i.e. dnx452, dnx46) you will run into the following error when running the application from Visual Studio 2015, when used with the initial release of the Beta 6 tooling:

JUL

2015

ASP.NET Beta 6 Is in the Wild
James Chambers

The Beta 6 release of ASP.NET 5 is now available. Run the following command to upgrade from a previous version: dnvm upgrade After that, a "dnvm list" command will give you the following:

JUL

2015

Upgrading Projects to .NET 4.6
James Chambers

The updates in the .NET Framework provide many improvements, including support for new language features in c#, garbage collection, enhancements in cryptography support, feature toggles, new classes in the BCL and others. The RyuJIT compiler adds significant performance gains for 64bit applications, even those not originally targeting the 4.6, improves startup times and can reduce the memory footprint of your application.

JUL

2015

Getting Your Build Server Ready for VS 2015
James Chambers

If you're modernizing your project, one of the things you'll surely want to do is to make sure that your build server is upgraded to support VS 2015. Regardless of what CI engine you're using, there will be at least a little bit of effort required to get your project building again.

JUL

2015

Upgrading a Real-World MVC 5 Application to MVC 6
James Chambers

These are exciting times for web development on the Microsoft stack, but perhaps a little confusing as well. For many years the cycle of moving from one solution and project system to the next hasn't been overly complex. Sure, there have been breaking changes, I've felt those pains myself, but provided the framework you were using continued to live on, there was a reasonable migration path.

JUL

2015

Workaround: NuGet Packages Failing to Download in Visual Studio 2015 RTM
James Chambers

I haven't figured out a common theme yet, but certain packages are failing to restore when you attempt to install them from the NuGet primary feed via the project.json file in Visual Studio 2015. Thanks to Brock Allen for confirming I wasn't going insane.

JUL

2015

Response From Postsharp.net Is Not a Valid Nuget V2 Service Response
James Chambers

After installing PostSharp.net on my machine for a project (I did the MSI install) I started getting errors during the package restore that ended up blocking my builds. They looked a lot like this: Error: FindPackagesById: EntityFramework.Core Response from https://www.postsharp.net="" nuget="" packages="" findpackagesbyid()?id="EntityFramework.Core" is not a valid NuGet v2 service response.

JUL

2015

Extracting a Service to Interact With Azure Table Storage
James Chambers

In this series we are looking at the basic mechanics of interacting with cloud-based Table Storage from an MVC 5 Application, using the Visual Studio 2013 IDE and Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

JUL

2015

Three Types of Relationships You Need to Survive as a Remote Worker
James Chambers

Getting through your work day on your own is easy enough. Over the long run, though, you're going to need to have some solid relationships in your life to help get you through the rough patches and pick you up from the falls, but more importantly, to be there when it's time to celebrate the wins.

JUN

2015

Rethinking our practices with the MVC framework
James Chambers

We get set in our ways, don't we? It's funny how the sharper and more confident we get with our frameworks and the tooling we employ to work with them, we also get a little more attached to our way of doing things. And then along comes a major version change, ripe with breaking changes and new bits to twiddle and we're left saying, "But, that's not how we've always done it!".

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