A few hours ago I was notified that I have been awarded with the Microsoft MVP Award for Development Technologies. This came totally unexpected. Especially so considering that during the last few years I have been splitting my time between Microsoft and other open source technologies. My public work has mostly been on Python and MongoDB. Yes I also released .NET open source projects in the meantime (more are coming soon) and yes, I wrote a few articles here and on the MSDN Blog, attended Microsoft events and did interviews. But really, I did not expect these activities to have an impact. This is probably why only a couple minutes from learning about the award I was suffering Impostor Syndrome symptoms. ...

A new version of Eve, the REST API framework for Humans, has been released today. Following the 0.6 milestone released one month ago, v0.6.1 introduces some fixes and few new important features. Upgrade is strongly encouraged. As always, a changelog with full list of updates is available.

The slides of my talk at Percona Live 2015 (Amsterdam) are online. It was titled “MongoDB and REST APIs a Match Made in Heaven” and it was meant as an introduction to Mongo, REST principles and the Eve python framework. Overall it has been a pleasant experience, although I found that splitting 300 attendees through seven concurrent tracks ultimately led to too much fragmentation. People often found themselves with 2-3 interesting talks all happening simultaneously, and just had to pick one. ...

On Stack Overflow and the Eve mailing list, but also in my mailbox and even on Twitter, I get a lot of enquiries on how to build custom endpoints within a Eve-powered RESTful application. Now, since within Eve all endpoints are fully customizable, what they really mean is: How do I setup endpoints without any binding to a data entity, just connected to a custom method? They would like to call something like /mycustomendpoint and get the response from a method they have defined somewhere in the Python sources. The standard endpoint-entity mapping provided by Eve covers 90% of their needs, but sometimes they just need endpoints that have nothing to do with data entities. ...

FatturaElettronicaPA has just been updated to v0.1.4. With this release invoice bodies (FatturaElettronicaBody items) are also validated. As always, you can install the package directly from NuGet. See the original post for more info. Also don’t forget to check the related projects. Update: v0.1.6 has also been released.

A few days ago Cerberus 0.9 was released. It includes a bunch of new cool features, let’s browse through some of them. Collection rules First up is the new set of anyof, allof, noneof and oneof validation rules. anyof allows you to list multiple sets of rules to validate against. The field will be considered valid if it validates against one set in the list. For example, to verify that a property is a number between 0 and 10 or 100 and 110, you could do the following: ...

I spent the last couple days in Paris with a bunch of smart architects and developers who are about to deal with a complex Monolithic-to-Microservices architecture transition. On my flight back to Italy I jotted down a few thoughts on the topic and then, this morning, the first thing that comes up on my newsfeed is Monolith First by Martin Fowler. Stunning, because the essay content totally resonates with my own notes, so much that it would perfectly serve as a recap for them. ...

Steven Lowe piece on Composition vs. Inheritance is a must read. Just to wet your appetite, let me quote the opening paragraph: In the beginning, there was no inheritance and no composition, only code. And the code was unwieldy, repetitive, blocky, unhappy, verbose, and tired. Copy and Paste were the primary mechanisms of code reuse. Procedures and functions were rare, newfangled gadgets viewed with suspicion. Calling a procedure was expensive! Separating pieces of code from the main logic caused confusion! It was a Dark Time. ...

this post is about an all-Italian open source release, so it’s going to be in Italian Il progetto Fattura Elettronica Open Source si è arricchito di un nuovo strumento: Web Services. Il namespace FatturaElettronicaPA.WebServices raccoglie una serie di client C# che consentono di consultare i Web Service per la Fattura Elettronica messi a disposizione dalla Pubblica Amministrazione. Sono disegnati in maniera da esporre tutti la stessa interfaccia ed essere al tempo stesso semplici e leggeri. Al momento lavorano in modalità sincrona ma l’obiettivo è di renderli tutti asincroni. ...

Last week I was in San Francisco for Build 2015, the annual conference event held by Microsoft and aimed toward software and web developers. Overall it has been a great experience. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to speak with Microsoft executives, Program Managers and developers about the new stuff they are cooking up and, in general, about that New Microsoft we all have been experiencing as of late (I have a guest post on MSDN Italy on that topic). ...