I'm starting writing this blog post on the train ride home from yet another amazing DDD event! This variant being DDD South West in Bristol! For those that haven't heard of DDD - there are various DDD conferences throughout the world - with quite a few in the UK. They are always free, and always on a Saturday. This means that it tends to attract developers who are genuinely passionate about software development, and more than happy to give up their weekend to be part of this awesome community.

I'm now using Docker for quite a few projects, but up until now, my build workflow had tended to involve building the application outside of Docker. Then whilst building the Docker image (using the Dockerfile of course), it would then just copy those published files into the image.

On Tuesday, it was our last .NET Oxford of the year! And given that our first ever meetup was in January, this now marks our first whole year!

I'm a heavy user of Workflowy, which is an amazing tool for taking notes. Due to the very hierarchical nature of Workflowy, I had a random idea that this would make a very cool Neo4j visualization! So I made a thing, and put it on GitHub.

I was recently investigating issues in some scheduling and dispatching code, which was actually quite difficult to visualize what was happening over time. So I decided to reach for the ELK Stack to help me see what was going on using time based charts. I've only used this briefly in the past, but given the very simple setup thanks to Docker, and also the power and flexibility of ELK, it made a huge difference in my investigations!

Whilst I've used Docker in the past, it has only really been for development and prototyping - mainly to host 3rd party software - eg. MongoDB, Neo4j, etc. I've tended to have my webapp itself outside of Docker - partly due to not using the Core version of ASP.NET, which isn't cross platform. So I decided it was about time I had a go at setting up ASP.NET Core in Docker! It turns out that this is actually extremely easy!