Category: Software Development

Apple's MapKit JS isn't currently as widely used as some alternative web mapping solutions, but it's a reasonable option, depending on your needs. While there's no free version, the usage limits are very high, and it's priced more competitively than many rivals, since it's included with an Apple Developer Membership. Integrating MapKit JS with an ASP.NET Core application is a little different at first, if you've never worked with JWT, but it's actually pretty straightforward.

Adding search functionality to a site can be deceptively complex. There's a lot more than just basic string matching that goes into a decent search function -- e.g. fuzziness, stemming, synonyms, etc. Luckily, there are several software services available that provide a lot of functionality out-of-the-box. I'm currently a fan of Elasticsearch for its ease of use and feature-set.

Elasticsearch provides two .NET clients: both a low-level .NET client, Elasticsearch.net, as well as their high-level client, NEST. This post is about using NEST with .NET.

After upgrading an application from ASP.NET Core 2.2 to ASP.NET Core 3.0, I had some issues where controller methods in an application were returning populated objects, but the HTTP responses were blank Json documents: . To make matters worse, there were no exceptions thrown -- the application was just silently sending blank documents to the browser.

A @section Scripts block does not work when placed in a partial view in ASP.NET. Unfortunately, you don't get any error messages if you try to add the section to a partial -- it just does nothing. In many cases, having a scripts section in a partial view would be an anti-pattern, since the partial can be rendered an unknown number of times. However, there are times when I believe a scripts section is warranted in a partial, particularly when you're trying to create dynamic JavaScript based on the model passed into the partial view. While you can't just use the actual @section Scripts in a partial view, you can add some HTML helper extensions to accomplish the same thing.

I'm running some ASP.NET Core applications under Kestrel on Linux proxied by NGINX. I ran into an issue recently where I was getting the following exception when I redirected with certain strings:

System.InvalidOperationException: Invalid non-ASCII or control character in header: 0x00ED