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I Made an API

Some things in Power Automate work great. Some of them can be better done by a dedicated programming language like .NET. So, I made an API for myself

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 | 10 minutes Read
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The Value of Immutability in .NET

Immutability - the state or quality of being unchangeable, unalterable, or unable to be modified over time.

Friday, March 6, 2026 | 9 minutes Read
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Importing JSON Files Into A C# Project

As part of this fun side project I’ve been working on, I’ve been playing around with data that comes in the form of JSON data files. What I want to do is use these data files to seed the data in my database. So here’s a quick one for anyone looking to import JSON data into a running C# application. I showed in a previous post how I set up my Aspire project to have a separate data migration project to handle the DbContext, schema migrations, and seeding for my Postgres database. While some of the basic seeding is hardcoded into C# classes, most of the data will be coming from various JSON files filled with the data. Let’s walk through how I set up the loading of those files into my database.

Monday, June 30, 2025 | 6 minutes Read
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What's New in .NET Aspire 9.1

Version 9.1 of .NET Aspire released a couple weeks ago and it has brought a whole host of new features to the framework. Aspire just keeps getting better and better. Here’s a few of my favorite highlights from the release.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 | 5 minutes Read
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Try-Catch-Throw in C#

We had an interesting discussion in a team meeting today and a good point was brought up about try/catch blocks and what happens when you throw an error in the catch section that perhaps a lot of developers new to C# might not be aware of.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025 | 4 minutes Read
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C# Advent 2024 - Making a List, Checking It Twice

He’s making a list Checking it twice Writing some code To track who’s naughty and nice Santa Claus is wri-ting… C# tldr; With .NET 9, you can now add custom action buttons to the .NET Aspire dashboard screen You ever wonder how Santa is able to keep track of the kids who are naughty and nice? I mean, it was probably fairly easy when an old man could send out his army of short helpers to check up on the handful of kids who fell into his purview from time to time through the year, and to keep all that recorded on paper. But today? With the world’s population exploding? How on Earth could he possibly do that now? With each passing year it’s gotten harder and harder. Never fear, Santa, I got ya covered. Let me throw together a quick proof of concept (POC) and show you the future!

Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | 8 minutes Read
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.NET Aspire - Adding Configuration

A followup video to my video about getting started with .NET Aspire. What if you already have a data source you want your Aspire app to connect to?

Monday, October 28, 2024 | 1 minute Read
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Getting Started with .NET Aspire

It’s a new video. If you missed my talk at Central Ohio .NET (CONDG) about .NET Aspire, I finally got the time to record it for my YouTube channel. Here it is: Getting started with .NET Aspire

Monday, October 21, 2024 | 1 minute Read
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Using C# and Power Automate To Sync An Outlook Calendar

There are some good tools out there for syncing your Outlook calendar to other calendars, especially for O365 or Outlook.com calendars. And they’re well worth the money for the good ones. But sometimes, in certain circumstances (such as if you have an on-prem exchange server that you can’t access from the cloud), you just need a quick and dirty tool to copy calendar events from a local Outlook instance to another calendar. That’s something you can do pretty quickly with a little C# and some Power Automate.

Friday, April 14, 2023 | 12 minutes Read
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Turning Any JSON API Into An App

The Internet is fantastic. There are a seemingly infinite array of APIs available for people to use. Many of them are completely free and open to use in pretty much any way you want to. For example, NASA has a wide variety of things available through its public API. I use one of them in Power Automate with a custom connector to post their daily image to Twitter. For my contribution to this year’s C# Advent, I will demonstrate how easily you can implement any JSON-based API into a C# based application.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 9 minutes Read
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Advent of Code 2022

I’m participating in the Advent of Code again this year. We’ll see if I get further than I did last year, which was about halfway before I quit. You can follow my progress in my GitHub repo over here. As usual, my solutions are written in C#.

Wednesday, December 7, 2022 | 1 minute Read
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Azure Back to School 2022 - Saving Customer Relationships with Azure Cognitive Services

For those of you who missed it yesterday, you can catch one of my two Azure Back to School sessions below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUL7Iuac3bI&ab_channel=BarretCodes

Sunday, September 4, 2022 | 1 minute Read