{"id":391,"date":"2016-06-24T15:02:31","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T15:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/?p=391"},"modified":"2016-06-24T15:03:11","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T15:03:11","slug":"old-dog-new-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/?p=391","title":{"rendered":"Old Dog, New Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been learning a lot of new &#8220;stuff&#8221; lately.\u00a0 I thought I&#8217;d share my pain.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Most of my development in the last 10 years or so has been of the following flavors of things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Microsoft Visual Studio.\u00a0 I&#8217;m accustomed to it, I like it, I&#8217;ve grown with it.\u00a0 And I&#8217;m probably going to stay with it, so if you have a zeal for another IDE &#8212; I&#8217;m happy for you, but no, I&#8217;m not changing that.<\/li>\n<li>Some of my development has been Windows Desktop applications.\u00a0 I know a lot of people that still use PCs for most of their &#8220;real work&#8221;, and a lot of things I&#8217;ve been doing just &#8220;live better&#8221; there.<\/li>\n<li>Virtually all of my development has been using Visual Basic.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s getting more and more difficult to find good\/working\/recent (meaning &#8220;up to date&#8221;) examples and troubleshooting guidance on VB, so it&#8217;s about time I tried diving a little deeper in C#.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve stubbed my toe on C# every time I&#8217;ve dabbled in it, but I haven&#8217;t really given it the &#8220;honest try&#8221; that I should.<\/li>\n<li>My web development, however, while being centered around Microsoft&#8217;s ASP.Net, has been using the old traditional &#8220;Web Forms&#8221; approach.\u00a0 Again, I&#8217;ve been &#8220;comfy&#8221; using that approach for years.\u00a0 But the MVC approach &#8212; short for Model View Controller &#8212; has some elegance in it that I really appreciate.\u00a0 Again, my attempts to pound MVC in my aging brain have met with resistance&#8230; until a couple of weeks ago, when I found a great video tutorial on Pluralsight.\u00a0 I&#8217;m finally &#8220;getting it&#8221;.\u00a0 But of course, the course and most of the examples I find are C#, not VB, so I&#8217;m multitasking as I cram &#8220;new stuff&#8221; in my head.<\/li>\n<li>Most of my web hosting has either been in a corporate IIS environment or on GoDaddy (Windows hosting, mind you).\u00a0 Along with my MSDN subscription I have a monthly credit for Azure usage, and while I&#8217;ve poked around that beast a little, off and on, I&#8217;ve been hesitant to dive in with full force.\u00a0 Like everything else, I&#8217;ve poked a toe in only to find &#8220;this one&#8217;s too hot, this one&#8217;s too cold.&#8221;\u00a0 But &#8212; you guessed it &#8212; I&#8217;m taking the plunge now.<\/li>\n<li>Lastly, my experience with SQL has been more of the old school, &#8220;let&#8217;s define some table and columns using SQL Server Management Studio&#8221;.\u00a0 And while I&#8217;ve read about Entity Framework a little, I haven&#8217;t been close enough to any to even poke a toe in it, except that now that I&#8217;m diving deeper into MVC, I&#8217;m running into it more&#8230; and I like how it &#8220;feels&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So here I am now, programming a multiple-application web site, hosted on an Azure Web App Service, writing in C# using ASP.Net MVC with Entity Framework\/Code First.\u00a0 And most days, I actually make real progress!<\/p>\n<p>This morning was not so good, though, as I tried to implement SendGrid to ship out Confirmation Emails from my user registration process.\u00a0 I used SendGrid before earlier this month while I was searching out resources to use in my new development project&#8230; but that was VB-based.\u00a0 Today, I had all sorts of issues getting it to work in my C# project.\u00a0 I finally went back and forth between the two projects and checked out the NuGet package versions, and turned out my VB SendGrid was 6.3.4, and the C# SendGrid I loaded this morning was 7.0.2.\u00a0 Was this major version difference the real problem?<\/p>\n<p>When I went to the SendGrid site, I was immediately flushed with emotions &#8212; good and bad.\u00a0 There it was, in big block letters:<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"394\" data-permalink=\"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/?attachment_id=394#main\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?fit=472%2C157\" data-orig-size=\"472,157\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break\" data-image-description=\"&lt;p&gt;From https:\/\/github.com\/sendgrid\/sendgrid-csharp&lt;\/p&gt;\n\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?fit=472%2C157\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-394\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?resize=472%2C157\" alt=\"2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break\" width=\"472\" height=\"157\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?w=472 472w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?resize=300%2C100 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?resize=326%2C108 326w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 472px) 100vw, 472px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I was mad and relieved at the same time.\u00a0 But now I&#8217;m calm, and moving on to more learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been learning a lot of new &#8220;stuff&#8221; lately.\u00a0 I thought I&#8217;d share my pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,57],"tags":[60,58,61,62,64,59,63],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-software-development","tag-azure","tag-c","tag-godaddy","tag-mvc","tag-sendgrid","tag-vb","tag-web-forms"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3d.rayharwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/2016-06-24-SendGrid-Break.png?fit=472%2C157","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p76pQa-6j","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3d.rayharwood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}