Yesterday on twitter I made a comment criticizing the practice of putting an API key in a query string parameter. I was surprised by the amount of attention it got and there were a number of responses questioning the significance of my objection. Rather than try and reply in 140 character chunks, I decided a blog post […]
When building client applications that need to connect to a HTTP API, sooner or later you are going to get involved in constructing a URL based on a API Root and some parameters. Often enough when looking at client libraries I see lots of ugly string concatenation and conditional logic to account for empty parameter […]
Runscope provides a way to log HTTP traffic that passes between client and server and it also can also continuously monitor Web API’s to ensure they are functioning correctly. When something goes wrong with the Web API you can be notified immediately. However, out of the box, there isn’t a way to be notified if […]
What follows is a description of an architectural pattern that I see many developers discussing that I believe is an anti-pattern. My belief is based on architectural theory and I have no empirical evidence to back it up, so feel free to come to your own conclusions. The proposed architecture looks like this, I’ve never […]
At a recent conference, I found myself once again in a conversation about the meaning of the term REST. I’ve had this conversation so many times, that I tend to forget that not everyone has heard my take on the subject. The conversation ended with a “you should blog that…”. Most developers are aware that […]
Fast iterations can be very valuable to the software development process, but make for more time spent doing deployments and testing. Also, more deployments means more opportunities to accidentally introduce breaking changes into your API. AppVeyor is a cloud based continuous integration server and Runscope enables you to do integration testing of your Web APIs, […]
It was announced today that Microsoft will be delivering a cross-platform and open source, cloud-optimized version of the .Net framework. Today’s announcement is a culmination of a series of changes that have been happening over the past few years in certain parts of Microsoft. Through the persistence of numerous Microsoft employees and the encouragement by […]
If you are building an ASP.NET Web API and want a view into the HTTP traffic that is hitting your API then this is a really quick solution that might prove useful. Runscope is a cloud based service that allows you to monitor, measure and test Web APIs. By using their API I was able to build a HttpMessageHandler that […]
This past week I spent in Atlanta, Georgia, attending Xamarin Evolve and Atlanta Code Camp. This was the second annual Evolve conference and attendance went from 600 the first year to 1200 this year. This year’s event was an impressive affair. Cultivating an Niche Not only did the number of attendees grow significantly from last […]