A Survey of .NET Static Site Generators
There is a lot of demand and a lot of active development around static site generators. If you're not familiar with them, these tools take markup or other simplified content and turn those resources into a full static website (HTML, CSS, etc.). There are a number of great static site generators out there, and it seems like a new one is released nearly every week. However, for this survey I am going to focus on the state of static site generation in the .NET ecosystem.
Fun With Fizz Buzz
On Twitter last night I noticed someone mention that they were "having fun with #FizzBuzz". I had never heard of Fizz Buzz before, so I decided to look it up. In short, Fizz Buzz is a simple programming task that any competent programmer should be able to accomplish. The task is to print numbers from 1 to 100, delimited by a comma and space. For each number divisible by 3 you print "Fizz" instead of the number, for each number divisible by 5 you print out "Buzz", and for each number divisible by both 3 and 5 you print out "FizzBuzz". The apparent simplicity and hidden complexity of this problem also makes it popular in programming interviews. I like a good brain teaser, so down the rabbit hole I went. My only ground rule was no help from the Internet.
Announcing RazorDatabase
On multiple web projects recently I've needed to display content that relies on metadata about other content. One example is displaying a list of recent news releases with summaries on the home page of a site. Another example would be something similar for blog entries. You can extend this idea even further by considering metadata oriented pages like a list of tags for all the blogs on a site, or a list of all news articles that pertain to a specific subject.