If you would like to have your web site use a social identity provider rather than creating or maintaining your own identity store you’ve got options.

Authentication has changed over the years, and my take on it has surely shifted. No longer is it the scary, intimidating beastie that must be overcome on our projects. Today, we can let external providers provide the authentication mechanisms, giving the user with a streamlined experience that can give them access to our application with previuosly defined credentials.

Let’s have a look at what it takes to allow users to authenticate in our application using GitHub as the login source, and you can check out the Monsters video take of this on Channel 9.

People, this is 2016. If you’re waiting on your project to build or feel like your IDE is sluggish, it’s time to inventory and make sure you have the optimal configuraiton for development rig. Let’s talk quickly about the things that make your machine go fast (or slow) and some simple tweaks that can get your builds moving along more quickly.

Feature folders provide an alternative, and possibly better approach to arranging your code inside of an MVC project.

In a previous blog post we talked about how to create a simple tag helper in MVC 6. In today’s post we take this one step further and create a more complex tag helper that is made up of multiple parts.

Grab yourself your copy of Visual Studio 2015 and buckle up! Today we’re going to create our own dnx command with support for options and arguments.

If you are a developer on the .NET stack, you’ve now got access to a great new extension to your development environment. DNX, or the .NET Execution Environment, is a powerful new extensibility point that you can leverage to build project extensions, cross-platform utilities, build-time extensions and support for automation. In this article I’ll walk you through the process of building your own custom DNX command on top of ASP.NET 5.0.

Updated Nov 22, 2015: Updated to account for changes in ASP.NET 5 RC1

In the last few blog posts, I have spent some time covering the tag helpers that are built in to MVC 6. While the built in tag helpers cover a lot of functionality needed for many basic scenarios, you might also find it beneficial to create your own custom tag helpers from time to time.

In this post, I will show how you can easily create a simple tag helper to generate a Bootstrap progress bar. NOTE: Thank you to James Chambers for giving me the idea to look at bootstrap components for ideas for custom tag helpers.