After over 10 years and 337 posts, I have decided to end contributing to my blog. I feel kind of sad about doing it, but I am having a hard time coming up with new topics I feel energized to write about. Perhaps I have said all I have needed to say, and there are a lot more people and platforms where people are writing, so its harder to contribute anything new to the conversation.

My journalistic endeavors won’t end completely. I still plan to write occasionally for Seeking alpha where you can follow me. If I do see something that I have to opine about, I will likely use twitter – mostly for retweets of interesting articles. But that will likely be few and far between.

In previous posts I have written about Blazor – and perhaps that is part of the culprit as to why my posts have dwindled. I am really enjoying programming using that framework – its relaxing like doing a crossword puzzle, and I find a lot of my creative energy going there. This last 10 years has taught me something – programming comes easier to me than writing. I recall a note I saw from my Grandfather who did some writing – who said something like the hardest part of writing is to put your rear end in a chair and start writing. It does take a surprising amount of motivation and energy to coalesce your thoughts and try to put them in a good (or in my case adequate) structure. I don’t seem to have that problem with programming – I can just sit down and open up a program – and the fingers just start flying.

I also plan to continue to work to try to streamline the generation of content. The articles I write for Seeking Alpha take a surprising amount of time and effort to write, and I am still trying to build out a framework for generating articles on a consistent basis. I still have hopes I can do this, after several years of trying. I also want to work more on automating content – perhaps the perfect marriage of programming and content. A simple example of this is what I do on the VFS Daily home page, which generates contest based on various events. One post I don’t think I ever got around to was the rise of computer generate news articles, which you see a lot of in financial and sports reporting. I think at some level I can create something to make it easier to create content – perhaps achieving a goal of Virtual Dan writing articles instead of the real Dan.

But for now, thanks for reading – and we will see if I can devise a future incarnation of Virtual Dan in the future.

Previously I posted a note on Blazor authentication and how my approach worked great. As it turns out, I think that approach was wrong and it left me at a deadend. So I thought it would be worth going deeper into what I am trying to do, and how I think my new approach will work better.

When I first design the layout and pattern for my Blazor application, I thought it was pretty straightforward. I wanted a login status bar at the top of the page showing the current logged in user, or if no usr is logged in a login button. I put my loginbar control directly in the main layout page to keep all my other pages from having to deal with it.

The problem occurred when I built a user dashboard page that I wanted to function where when that page is requested, and no one is logged in, it pops open a modal form (using Blazored Modal) and prompts the user to login. After messing with it a bit, I could get the user dashboard page to refresh after login, but could not get the login bar to update when the user logs in via this method.

After much googling and tinkering, I finally decided to deal with creating custom events to notify the controls of a login. I had been avoiding this – after working with javascript events I swore off dealing with that level of complexity on the front end. But after reading the docs, it appeared that this will be a useful tool for any Blazor project. I was really getting stymied until I stumbled upon Jason Watmore’s example on Github. That is a nice simple example of communicating between components.

I was able to adapt the example to my scenario, and it turns out to be a nice simple solution. Here is how it works. I created a ‘OnLoginComplete’ event which my login form fires when there is a successful login. I added a listener for this event to the loginbar and my userdashboard page, so when the event is fired these components wake up and refresh themselves, and reflect the username and other data important to the logged in user. Once I got the hang of it, it was quite simple.

I thought about creating an ‘OnLogout’ event, but it turns out I don’t need it. For now the only place I have a logout button is in the loginbar at the top of the page, and when that is clicked I destroy the credentials and redirect back to the home page.

After many attempts I feel like I have the right solution, and I think firing and listening for events will be handy for future projects. I took a lot of wrong turns in arriving at this solution.. but then isn’t that part of the fun of learning new languages?

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