Ardalis is Steve Smith
Proven Expertise
Steve Smith has been recognized by Microsoft as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2002, and was a member of Microsoft’s Regional Director program for 10 years. He is also a founding member of the ASPInsiders, an external advisory group for the ASP.NET product team. As Microsoft launches their new version of ASP.NET, he has been contributing to the product and authoring many sections of the official documentation on GitHub.
How can I help you
I offer various different professional services that includes private training for corporate customers, accelerate your project with a bit of mentoring or even a home like inspection for your code and a software application.
Mentoring
You or your team can benefit from Steve’s experience with ASP.NET using SOLID development principles, proven design patterns, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
“Our team could spend many hours with other developers figuring out a problem or best practice, or we could set up a meeting with Steve.”
“[Steve] is able to quickly understand the problems we are trying to solve and then works with us to solve the problems.”
Online Training
Steve has published many courses on Pluralsight, covering topics from N-Tier architecture to Refactoring to Domain-Driven Design. You can also follow Steve on YouTubefor more online video content. See what others say about Steve’s courses.
Assessments
Quickly learn where your application could be improved with an application assessment from Steve. An assessment will reveal “low hanging fruit” that will add the greatest value for the least effort, and can identify security and performance issues as well as maintainability anti-patterns and technical debt. Read more…
Workshops
Look for Steve’s workshops on software craftsmanship, ASP.NET 5, and Domain-Driven Design at an upcoming conference, or schedule one for your team. Contact Steve for more details.
Speaking Engagements
Steve is a regular speaker at tech conferences like Codemash, Stir Trek, DevIntersections, and more. You can find some of his past presentations on SlideShare and SpeakerDeck.
Watch Steve discuss Software Quality on Channel 9 with Seth Juarez:
Interviews and Podcasts
Listen to interviews with Steve Smith on various industry shows and podcasts.
Latest Articles
It's worked quite well and is completely free for our needs. You can easily add bots and notifications fromother system,including your own ASP.NET web applications, usingweb hooks. One of the easier ways to configure notifications from things you care about as a developer to your Discord server is with GitHub web hooks. There'sgreatwrite-up on how to do this here, which I'm basically enhancing…
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GraphQL is the new ORM, and your API endpoint is the new stored procedure. About fifteen years ago, a debate raged in the still-young .NET development world over how best to access data. On the one side were the traditionalists, among them database administrators (DBAs) and many experienced software developers with experience building efficient, performant applications. On the other were (mostly…
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Azure App Services are a very easy and economical way to quickly deploy your ASP.NET/ASP.NET Core apps to the cloud. You can get started for free if you just want to try out something you're developing (without uptime considerations) and entry-level plans are pretty affordable: The docs for publishing to an Azure App Service are pretty good so I won't get into that here. I recommend configuring…
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Recently I had one of my newsletter subscribers ask me a question about whether it was a good practice to use a boolean parameter to alter the behavior of a method. Martin Fowler describes (many of*) these as Flag Arguments. The topic is also covered in this StackExchange question. Clean Code also discusses it. On a slightly related note, the Flags Over Objects antipattern describes this same…
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I'm continuing to have fun building out features for the devBetter site, which provides resources for my group coaching members. We meet weekly to answer questions, work through exercises together, and share progress, but we also have a very active Discord server where we do a lot of the same thing throughout the week. As I was working on integrating GitHub actions with deployments to Azure, I…
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A couple of months ago I published a new, revised course called C# Design Patterns: Adapter on Pluralsight. It's one of my favorite patterns and its predecessor, the Design Patterns Library, remains one of the most popular courses of all time on Pluralsight. It's almost 16 hours long but I encourage you to get through it as an achievement if you can. Look for a revised learning path through the…
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I’m a fan of checklists – they’re an intermediate step before automating a process to ensure it’s done correctly and consistently. You’ll finda number of different checklists on this site. This one is about streaming, specifically formy twitch.tv/ardalis account. I’ve been meaning to blog about this forever, but it’s just been sitting in my OneNote for the longest time while other things have been…
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A feature introduced last month by the GitHub team is called draft pull requests. When you create a Draft Pull Request, it cannot be merged until it is marked as ready for review. This is useful because often pull requests are used as conversations, often prior to the work being ready to merge. Common approaches to this in the past have included such classic approaches as: Adding “WIP” for “Work…
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Have you ever been on a software team for a while, and then someone new joins the team and starts asking the usual questions about why this or that technology or pattern is being used on the project? And then a few months later, someone else joins and all the same questions come up again? Or maybe some team member, whether new or not, constantly wants to relitigate every choice, potentially to the…
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This is obvious once you think about it but I’ve found many people haven’t thought about it so I’m going to lay it out here real quick. A lot of teams use some kind of task or kanban board today to track the status of work. This is typically part of some kind of agile or Scrum or kanban process. If you want to learn more about kanban, check out my short course on the fundamentals of kanban…
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