I spend a lot of time trying (and failing) to stay up to speed on the latest happenings in web development, Angular, .NET, Azure, and much more. These “roundup” posts contain all the interesting articles and tidbits I’ve come across. These links have helped me. I hope they can help you, too!

slugify is a handy npm package to convert a string to a “slug”. Think “Some Document Title” to “some-document-title”! I actually created a cmdlet using this for normalizing my blog post titles, but that’s a post for another day.

I spend about 75% of my day in Visual Studio Code, and I still didn’t know about many of the things in this list.

Are you remembering to unsubscribe your subscriptions in Angular? Netanel Basal took a stab at an automatic approach. Sadly it isn’t completely automatic, but it’s close!

I’m not usually a fan of abstraction for abstraction’s sake, but observable services in Angular can be quite useful, and easy to build.

The Angular CDK is a great library. I plan to blog about some of the things I’m doing with it soon. In the meantime, check out how to build an expansion panel with it.

I’m still getting up to speed on Angular Animations. This post at AlligatorIO is a bit dated, but it still helped me a lot.

Another good one from AlligatorIO: Angular has a built-in abstraction for DOM manipulation.

I’ve been using Moment.js for a long time, yet I didn’t realize how fully you could customize it.

I love LINQ. It’s one of my favorite C# features. I spend quite a bit of time writing JavaScript though. Fortunately, many LINQ operations translate nicely to built-in JavaScript functions. Array.some can be used in JavaScript in much the same way you might use Any in C#. Here’s more about that function.

“Scope” matters when dealing with variables in Angular templates. I’ve been burned by this before.

Ever wanted to implement two-way bindings in Angular? Here’s how they actually work.

I’ve been working with various 3rd party systems and their webhooks. Both NGrok and localtunnel allow you to spin up your app locally, then get a public-facing URL that points to your app. This was invaluable, and works great with ASP.NET Core running locally.

NLog has been my go-to logging solution for years. Getting it up and running in ASP.NET Core 2 is actually very easy.

Want to show an avatar for your users, but don’t want to manage the avatars yourself? Give an Email address to unavatar, and it will look across various social services to find a profile picture for you.

if-else conditions are a new thing in Angular 4+. I somehow overlooked them until recently, but they do indeed help you write cleaner templates in some cases.

Lesson learned from Stack Overflow: if you want to accept form parameters in ASP.NET Core, use the FromForm attribute!

Need to parse a string containing a “full name” into first, middle, and last reliably? It isn’t as easy as just splitting on whitespace. Check out NameParserSharp instead!

If you’re using just about any Angular libray, you’ve probably seen the forRoot pattern. Here’s a good write-up if you’re curious what is actually going on, or if you want to know how you can use the pattern when building your own modules.

I like the idea of Parcel because it (mostly) Just Works, even with Vue SFC. Angular support doesn’t seem to be all the way there yet, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.

There’s so much you can do with Microsoft Azure these days that it’s easy to miss out on cool features and capabilities. Michael Crump’s Azure Tips and Tricks series is a great way to learn about all the awesome little things Azure can do!