Because Developers are Awesome

AI Assisted Editors: A Comparison (Part 2)

August 01, 2025 10 minute read

In my last article, I provided a break down of the three commercial AI assisted editors that I use on a regular basis. However, not everyone can afford a monthly subscription ($20/month is the standard), or maybe you prefer different models or a more local development environment. There are still options that you can use to get AI assisted editing yet avoid the subscription charge. What is an AI Assisted Editor? As a developer, you open up an editor and write code. AI Assisted editors ...

AI Assisted Editors: A Comparison (Part 1)

August 01, 2025 13 minute read

You can’t go a lap about development these days without bumping into AI assisted editors. Most of the AI tooling companies I see are heavily investing in Visual Studio Code based editors, but you have some others out there as well. I’m going to break the comparison I’m doing into three articles - one on the paid offerings I’ve personally used, one on the “free” offerings I’ve used, and one on the quirks of the LLMs that are in common use. Hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll understand th...

Customizing Keycloak with Aspire - Part 3

October 04, 2024 6 minute read

This is the last article in a trio of articles about incorporating Keycloak into .NET Aspire applications. Thus far, I’ve covered the basics and some common customizations. This part covers what you need to do if you want to store the identity information within a PostgreSQL database. I’ve chosen PostgreSQL for this because it seems to be the database of choice for Aspire when you want to run things locally and in the cloud and also because the PostgreSQL database driver is included by def...

Customizing Keycloak with Aspire - Part 2

September 30, 2024 4 minute read

In my last article, I introduced the Keycloak identity service and showed how the development version can be easily integrated into a project. Development services get you started quickly and allow you to defer the details until later on. At some point, however, you need to take control of your service and start working towards production. There are a number of things that the development version of the Keycloak identity service doesn’t do that you need in production. These include SSL/TL...

Integrating Keycloak with Aspire - Part 1

September 26, 2024 8 minute read

In my series on ASP.NET Identity, I mentioned (several times) that you should be using Keycloak, Auth0, Corbado, or another identity service instead of rolling your own. That’s all good, but I left it up to you to figure out exactly how to do that. I thought it would be a good idea to configure an Aspire project from the beginning and show how authentication and authorization with a service works. This article will be more of a “make the code work” type of article, with follow-on articles ...

ASP.NET Identity deep dive - Part 6 (Social logins)

September 20, 2024 11 minute read

This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup Account registration Signing in and out with a username and password Password reset Email confirmations Social logins Now that I have the basic flows sorted out (which includes username/password with registration, self-service password reset, and account lockout support), it’s time to turn my attention to o...

ASP.NET Identity deep dive - Part 5 (Sending email)

September 18, 2024 12 minute read

This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup Account registration Signing in and out with a username and password Password reset Email confirmations Social logins Today is the final spot for the basic flows. Up to this point, I’ve been logging links in places where I should be sending emails. Sending emails in development is scary. First, things co...

ASP.NET Identity deep dive - Part 4 (Password reset)

September 16, 2024 7 minute read

This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup Account registration Signing in and out with a username and password Password reset Email confirmations Social logins I’ve already implemented the registration and login/logout functionality. I’ve also done some updates since the last check in. Most notably, I’ve automatically signed the user in after regis...

ASP.NET Identity deep dive - Part 3 (Authentication)

September 14, 2024 6 minute read

This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup Account registration Signing in and out with a username and password Password reset Email confirmations Social logins Today, I’m tackling authentication - that is, signing in and out of an account using the web UI. You may remember from my last article that I set up the initial web UI to include a link to ...

ASP.NET Identity deep dive - Part 2 (Registration)

September 13, 2024 13 minute read

This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup Account registration Signing in and out with a username and password Password reset Email confirmations Social logins As you may remember from the last article, the first user journey I am going to implement is the registration journey. This is actually one of the more complex journeys with several parts t...

Adrian Hall