Getting Started with WebSockets

WebSockets are a useful tool that allow for two-way communication between a web server and a browser. In this post, I am going to introduce the basics of WebSockets by making a (very) simple chat application using Express, HTML, and vanilla JavaScript.

Getting, Setting, and Understanding Web Cookies using Express and WebdriverIO

Cookies, both the tasty kind and the web browsing kind, aren’t new to me. I’ve clicked my fair share of “this site uses cookies” pop-ups, but until recently, I hadn’t encountered cookies in my work as a programmer. Being newly tasked with the configuration and testing of cookies, I realized that, although cookies are ubiquitous […]

Reactive Programming: A Timed Popup Component with RxJS

Reactive programming is all about streams. It involves combining streams, filtering streams, and transforming streams. In reactive programming, the application does not need to pull for data, but it is notified whenever a new event occurs. A few months ago, I wrote a post on reactive programming in WPF using ReactiveUI. Recently, we’ve been working on […]

Four Hurdles when Prototyping with Material-UI for React

Google created the Material Design design language to be used across devices. If you’re using Material Design with React, I’d recommend Material-UI for React to get the ball rolling. It’s a library of components or pre-styled elements (similar to the Bootstrap framework) that are easy to add to a page, and the components look and […]

Managing Data Loaders in Node.js with Shared State

When developing software, it’s always tough to work with caching. While my team appreciates the efficiencies that Data Loader can provide for applications, we still struggle with the same problems that always come up when caching queries, mainly invalidating caches when a data set has changed.

Understanding the Apollo Default Resolver

According to documentation for Apollo’s GraphQL-tools: You don’t need to specify resolvers for every type in your schema. If you don’t specify a resolver, GraphQL.js falls back to a default one… The documentation goes on to state that the default resolver will look for a property on the parent object with the field name that’s […]

IdentityServer Authentication with an MVC Client & Unauthorized Loops

I’ve learned a lot about authentication this past month. My team has been working on migrating an application from using Forms Auth to IdentityServer single sign-on. Our goal is to provide a centralized authentication for all parts of the system.

Migrating an Ejected Create React App to TypeScript

I love Create React App, and I also love TypeScript. That means I really love react-scripts-ts, which is a great way to spin up a new SPA for experimental purposes.

A JavaScript Object that Dynamically Returns Unknown Properties

In our current project, we make extensive use of JavaScript objects as dictionaries, with the property name functioning as a key for the object we want to look up. We can use the in operator to test for property presence, and the dictionaries are perfectly JSON-serializable. However, when it comes time to build test fixtures […]

Creating Azure WebJobs in F#

My colleague Brian recently wrote about Azure Functions in F#. Azure Functions are great, and I definitely recommend them if they fit your use case. These functions are built on top of an older background processing system called WebJobs. While Functions have largely eclipsed WebJobs, there remain certain [situations][webjobs-vs-functions] where the latter is still a […]

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