I've committed to the 100 Days of Code Challenge. This is my second attempt. The last time around I only managed to get to about 14 days but then life happened. I decided that I would rather start again then continue after having missed so many days. It didn't feel right.

This is the first post of 15 blog posts about my 100 Days of Code Challenge. I'll post every week what I've learned.

I started off with my 100 day challenge by doing a YouTube ASP.NET Core tutorial by Kudvenkat. YouTube is free and I wanted to see what I can learn for free first before investing money on a paid course.

I like that the tutorials are 5 - 15 minutes each, that means you can go through a video. Going through a 1 - 5 hour tutorial isn't that easy unless you have a media player where you can save bookmarks.

Setting Up My Environment

I started off by setting up my development environment. This was easy because I come from a Windows background and I run a Windows machine. I'm doing an ASP.NET Core tutorial. The Core part means its open source and I can actually use Mac or Linux to set up my environment.

I'm hoping to later on use Ubuntu to develop my next project. But, I saw in the tutorial the instructor uses Visual Studio as an IDE and I'm not 100% if VS is on Linux yet. Its best to stick to the tools the instructor uses. If you run into errors, you won't know if its your tools or a genuine bug.

That is exactly what happened to me. I had the ASP.NET Core 2.1 software development kit (SDK) installed instead of the 2.2. I did download and install version 2.2 and when I build my project, I got a build error. I did the exact same things as in the tutorial, but mine didn't work.

I decided to ditch 2.2 and went back to 2.1 instead. The drawback is that any error I come across I chalk it off to the fact that I'm using a different version of the SDK. For instance, I was learning about the differences between in and out of process hosting. The in process hosting didn't work. I continued the course as if it was working fine.

It's best to follow an up-to-date course to avoid any of these errors.

Learning about the theory

At the start of the tutorial course, the instructor went through a lot of the theoretical stuff. I've done another ASP.NET tutorial before and it didn't go into that much detail. I managed to get a web app up and running in less than 2 hours of following this other tutorial.

Thinking about it now, even though the theory is boring, I do understand much more about ASP.NET Core than I did before. In the other tutorial I used the CLI to build my views and controllers. Now I can create it from scratch. Somewhere down the line when I need to debug my project, it would help to know what's going on under the hood to find and clear those pesky bugs.

Interfaces

I'm embarrassed to write that I didn't use interfaces before in my projects. I know what it is and the benefits of having using them, but my projects were fine without them.

Granted, after I completed a project, I didn't do a lot of maintenance afterwards. Where I did do some maintenance, I could have done it faster had I used interfaces. Who knows, I would.

I used an interface to create an employee repository for an employee model. I'm still unsure how this helps. I'm hoping that a light bulb turns on later in the course when I need to make changes or when I finally connect to a database.

Decoupling

Decoupling is a concept I've learned about in Software Engineering class about two to three years ago. I've never used it in practice though. Now, the instructor mentioned it a couple of times and explained why it is important.

There are three types of ways to pass data from a model to a view. Using ViewBag and ViewData doesn't follow the principle of decoupling. Its best to use a strongly typed view by specifying the model type in the view using @model directive.

Decoupling your objects and methods should make it easier to maintain in the future. There will be less need for changes. Swapping out parts would be a breeze.

In conclusion

I learned a lot this week and I expect the same in upcoming weeks. I'm not too sure how I will blog about what I've learned. I like giving a short summary instead of giving technical details and code examples of what I've learned.

Once I become an expert in ASP.NET Core, I'll write technical blog posts. For now, I'm documenting my journey from 1 to 100 days.

For more detail on how I did each day, check out my 100 Days of Code Log on Github. Follow me on Twitter for all my 100 Days Of Code tweets.

Until next time. Thanks for reading.

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