Deploy a Blazor Server app on Linode with a free SSL certificate for $5

What? Linode offers a cheap Linux machine for as low as $5 USD. Blazor offers a lightweight binary messaging client-server framework for as low as 3 bytes per update. I am tired of Azure for simple things. Why? I used to pack and push a docker image to Heroku with Blazor Server and was very proud of myself. Earlier in 2022, Heroku shut down their free tier. In my opinion, good riddance to sad rubbish....

January 2, 2023 · 8 min · Brian

Create a Markdown Blog using Git, Hugo, and Azure

History I created a blog on the interwebs back in 2019 while working at The Boeing Company. I had internal Mattermost channels and social sharing groups where we shared information but a lot of my eureka moments were too niche for the bigger company audience. We were doing a lot of interesting things and constantly hitting the same odd issues over and over. I realized googling helped piece specific issues together over time but never had a straight forward answer....

February 3, 2022 · 6 min · Brian

Blazor C# highlighting is YUCKY - Part 2: JetBrains Rider

Here we go again.. This is how you disable it in Rider: File > Settings > Editor > Color Scheme > ASP.NET Drop down the Razor list and choose Code Block. Uncheck the background color to the right. Tuh-dah! This was default on the VS Dark Theme for Rider. I’m not sure about others.

July 11, 2021 · 1 min · Brian

Visual Studio Blazor C# Highlighting is Yucky

Here’s how you can fix it Change it back to C# code: in VS2019 click Tools>Options>Environment>Fonts and Colors>HTML Razor Code Background. On the right side, you can select another Item background. You can select another background that uses your default color and save it as a custom color then go back to select it. Use code-behind! You can add a standard C# class as a partial class in the same parent as the Blazor Page and name it PageName....

August 17, 2020 · 1 min · Brian

Azure Dev Spaces and Kubernetes Orchestration Support option in Visual Studio 2019

It’s been awhile but this one is important. Mostly because it frustrated me so much. When you right click on an ASP.NET Core project and Add>Container Orchestrator Support and add Helm Charts/Kubernetes then also add Docker Compose support, it seems that the default action for VS2019 is to push your F5 experience to Azure Dev Spaces. While this is pretty cool from a development experience perspective (especially leveraging the power of a distributed platform - I didn’t realize you could compose to it [shrugs]), it isn’t for everyone and honestly shouldn’t be the default....

March 27, 2020 · 2 min · Brian