General Post Archives

11 Jan

2023

Rebooting the Azure for Executives Podcast with Landing Zones

By: David Starr Category:General Post

My co-host Paul Maher and I took a break from the Azure for Executives podcast for a while and are happy to report that we are back in the game for 2023! Not only are we releasing new episodes, but we are refocusing the show a bit on broader topics of Azure and cloud computing. […]

1 Dec

2022

Refactoring Bloated Controllers with [FromService]

By: David Starr Category:General Post3 Comments

In my previous article, Refactoring Bloated Controllers with IServiceProvider, I explored using the Service Locator Pattern to reduce the number of services injected into an ASP.NET MVC controller constructor. While a convenient way to reduce the number of constructor arguments, using IServiceProvider does have some potential downsides. It has been a few years since I […]

26 Nov

2022

Refactoring Bloated Controllers with IServiceProvider

By: David Starr Category:General Post7 Comments

I have come into an ASP.NET MVC project that has a HomeController that takes at least 10 service arguments in its constructor. My first line of attack is to factor out the Action methods into separate controllers that only need a subset of the injected services to work properly. So, first and foremost I recognize […]

29 Dec

2021

Life’s a Party: Analyzing Party Compositions for Combat – Encounters in Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition through Monte Carlo Methods

By: David Starr Category:General Post

My son, Mason Starr, is a grad student at Georgia Tech in astrophysics or something similar that I can’t understand. In any case, he recently co-wrote a final paper for his graduate-level stats class with Michael Hauge. There’s a lot of math, but keep going. There are histograms with the word “Barbarian” in them for […]

5 Apr

2021

Testing Azure ARM templates is easier with ARM-TTK

By: David Starr Category:General Post

Editing Azure ARM templates can be a bit monotonous and especially so when you are deploying the template after each change just to see if your changes worked. ARM-TTK (ARM Test Toolkit) is a tool designed to help make that process a bit easier. Written in PowerShell, the scripts run a set of tests against […]

8 Feb

2021

2021 PC Build List

By: David Starr Category:General Post

I haven’t built a machine in probably 15 years because laptops have been enough to function as my primary machine. While this has remained largely true, there are some high-end jobs my laptop just doesn’t have the horsepower to drive some workloads that I would like to work with. Example workloads include model training, data […]

31 Oct

2020

The Rise of App Stores for Commercial Software

By: David Starr Category:General Post

App stores for mobile devices are ubiquitous. Few people think of heading to a software company’s website to download an app. They head for their mobile platform’s app store and they certainly don’t think of calling up a sales department to make an app purchase. The commoditization and disposability of apps is a significant part […]