During the development with C# you have certainly already encountered attributes, whether consciously or unaware. Today I want to go a little deeper into what attributes are, what kind of them are already present in the .NET framework, and how you can define your own attributes. Microsoft defines attributes as a powerful way to associate metadata or descriptive information with code. But what exactly does that mean? Classes have, among other characteristics, fields, methods, properties, but also a state and behavior. You can “decorate” code elements with attributes to further describe them. Doing so, however, has no effect on their state. ...

I have already written about the advantages of a CSS preprocessor like LESS in this post. Today I want to show you how you can easily implement support for such a preprocessor in your ASP.NET Core project. I will use Gulp to create the ability to write LESS files and convert them to CSS files so that they can be integrated into the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, I will automate the whole thing so that the LESS file is converted without manual interaction on every build. ...

Hey, today just a short note on a few changes to my website. Basically I planned to take up various topics in the area of software development and to capture my thoughts on this blog. However, as you may have noticed, I have published a lot about other subjects lately. I want to return to my roots on this site, so I decided to set up a separate blog. From now on you will only find posts on software development and related topics on this blog. Sports-related posts will now be posted to mjurtz.com/triblog or triblog.mjurtz.com as soon as I get the subdomain set up correctly. ...

There are lots of articles and even books about the art of writing clean code. But when exactly is code actually to be considered clean? Today I’d like to give you a brief overview of how you can assess and improve your code quality. I should perhaps note that writing good code, and therefore this article, is independent of the programming language used and is rather methodical in nature. However, for more detailed information, I recommend that you really get a book on the subject. The standard advice on this is certainly “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin. ...

Writing down your goals is extremely helpful for really achieving them. With fixed, terminable goals with fixed intermediate steps, you make it much easier for yourself to really achieve your self-imposed goals. Today I would like to show you a way to define your goals with the help of the so-called “Impossible List”. At first glance this list looks like an Impossible List, but it is definitely not: Joel Runyon, the author of the first Impossible List describes the classic Bucket List as a static list that was written at some point in life and usually none of the points written down really affect the life of the creator. So the goals are written down, but never reached or at least actively pursued. ...