Barret Blake
Architect
Barret has nearly 20 years of professional experience in the Microsoft & web technology stacks, including .NET, SQL Server, Azure, JavaScript, and Power Platform. He is a Microsoft MVP in the Power Automate and .NET areas. He is a blogger, content creator, and an active speaker and volunteer at conferences and user groups across Ohio and the US. He is an advocate for mentorship in the developer community and the need to build up the next generation of developers. When he's not doing all that he enjoys spending his time with family, LEGO, D&D, model railroading, and personal projects.
Posts
March 31, 2026Unit testing has been around for a long time. We know how to do it. It's a well established pattern and it just works. But unit testing an LLM is nothing like …
March 24, 2026Experiment Driven Development lets you test new ideas and features on a small subset of users.
March 17, 2026Part of any good software development strategy includes making sure that your tests have a good set of data to test the code against.
March 10, 2026It can be useful to have the ability to enable or disable certain functionality in your application. Feature flags give us the ability to do so.
March 03, 2026Migrating between static site generators can be a challenge. AI made it quick and easy.
February 24, 2026There are many different approaches to software development. In the earliest days, there was the “Test Last” or “Code First” approach. A …
February 19, 2026Aspire has basic support for OpenTelemetry out of the box. But what about when we're ready to do more.
February 05, 2026It's inevitable that production will fail. Your ability to respond quickly greatly depends on being able to determine what went wrong.
January 12, 2026Sometimes it can be really useful to add commands to your Aspire dashboard. It's easy to do and amazingly useful.
January 06, 2026One of the greatest features of Aspire is how easy it is to set up, configure, and work with databases.
December 15, 2025C# 14 now lets you use a null-conditional operator on the left side of an assignment
December 10, 2025With the arrival of Aspire 13, Aspire now provides an MCP server that your AI coding agent can access to see the logs of your running Aspire application.