Hello

I was recently talking to another developer about the importance of never exposing internal identifiers to the outside world. A well-known example of this is using an auto-incrementing identity field in SQL and exposing that field through an API. A client can look at the highest number to tell how many records exist, in an ordering system this is far from ideal. Now everyone will know how many orders you have created....

Learned a cool little trick a while back from Khalid. As a developer, you will often run into scenarios that require you to get a subset of all fields from a model. There are many ways to achieve this task, returning the type and then grabbing each property, for example, take the following User type. public class User { public User(string name, DateTime dob) { var random = new Random(); Id = random....

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to build a good Web API, regardless of the technology (REST vs GraphQL) or philosophy used. One concept that has been stuck on my head is the idea of marking up API documents to provide more context around the data. A Web API document is the response returned by the API itself, you will often see this term used in API specifications like GraphQL, HAL, JSON-LD, and JSON:API....

.NET makes it super simple to update the dependencies of a project. If you are following a solution structure like Clean Architecture where the Web project should not be referenced by the Core project or you have created your own solution structure that requires certain projects do not reference another project then you might need a way to avoid having developers incorrectly adding dependencies. The diagram above gives a high-level view of all project dependencies in a Clean Architecture solution....

A few weeks ago I came across a blog post from Aaron Francis in which he talks about creating efficient pagination using deferred joins. A technique he remembered reading in High Performance MySQL: Proven Strategies for Operating at Scale. The idea is that without deferred joins pagination queries can impact response time. Pagination is done using an OFFSET to skip over a number of records, however, even though the results are skipped, the database must still fetch those records....