We've seen the same pattern at almost every client. The backlog has a top half and a bottom half, and the top half is the active list. From it features are being shipped and bugs are being fixed. The bottom half, though, just gets longer, f…
In this blog, I want to show you how I built something I estimated would take me 20-60 hours of work in about half a day. This included a React frontend, .NET A…
I’m currently a 12-time recipient of the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. The Microsoft MVP award is something Microsoft grants annually…
As a software consultant, I’ve noticed a pattern play out at nearly every client over the last year. A team adopts Cursor or Claude Code or Copilot and th…
It seems like everyone is doing AI-assisted development these days. For a lot of people, it feels like magic: you ask for a thing, and suddenly you have that th…
Building a cross-platform app usually starts with a deceptively simple goal: one team, one codebase, multiple targets. The reality is that your framework choice…
Microsoft has announced that starting January 2026, the C# Dev Kit and C# VS Code extension will no longer support development using the .NET 6 and .NET 7 SDKs.
Many organizations today are looking to integrate AI into their existing infrastructure without completely rewriting everything. In this blog post, I’ll w…
We started Trailhead ten years ago with a simple promise: to make custom software project more predictable and less risky. Along the way we turned that promise…
Every year, .NET Conf brings developers from around the world together to celebrate what’s new, what’s next, and what’s possible with .NET. This year’s event, .
If you spend any time in technology circles these days, or even just scroll LinkedIn for five minutes, you might think AI has already solved every problem humanity has ever faced. There is a lot of talk about the “future of intelligence,” v…
Once upon a time, in a land not so far from production, there lived a growing kingdom of buttons, forms, and other UI components. What began as a peaceful realm of components slowly turned into a tangled forest of inconsistencies—every team…
Everyone seems to be chasing microservices these days—promises of independent teams, targeted scaling, and fault isolation make them sound irresistible. It's been said you should only reach for microservices if you have a really good reason…
Recently, I was reflecting on Large Language Models (LLMs) and how they contain all or much of the knowledge of the internet in a much smaller storeage space. For example, the ChatGPT 4 model is about 570 GB, a size almost anyone could stor…
Distributed systems are all the rage right now—and for good reason. Many organizations are successfully turning to distributed architectures like microservices to meet their modern scalability and maintainability challenges. However, like e…
In a previous blog post, I showed how you can speed up .NET APIs using Redis to cache frequently-accessed and infrequently-changing data. If you haven't checked it out yet, it provides a solid foundation on how Redis can dramatically improv…
Trailhead Technology Partners is excited to welcome Mark Adams as a new partner. With decades of leadership experience and a passion for strong client relationships, Mark is an excellent addition to our team. Mark has more than two decades…
Legacy systems are the backbone of countless organizations. Yet, as technology advances, these systems often become roadblocks, riddled with challenges like technical debt, undocumented workflows, brittle integrations, and limited scalabili…
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a critical practice for managing cloud infrastructure efficiently. But what happens if you already have a large set of Azure resources and want to manage them using Terraform? You can manually reverse-enginee…
.NET 9 was released in November 2024 at .NET Conf. It introduces a wealth of new features and improvements that make it easier than ever to build high-performance, modern applications across platforms. Microsoft covered many different new f…
Caching plays a crucial role in performance in web applications by reducing strain on backend systems. The new HybridCache library, available in preview in .NET 9, simplifies caching and addresses some limitations of previous approaches, ma…
Selecting the right tech stack can be a make-or-break decision for many projects. While some applications benefit from a complex stack, many others can thrive with a simpler, more streamlined setup. Choosing a lighter stack doesn’t just cut…
Recently, Trailhead partner Jonathan "J." Tower had the pleasure of discussing the topic of building a trusted software agency on Cory House's House of Code podcast. Together, they delved into what it takes to run a successful software agen…
ASP.NET Web Forms has been a cornerstone of a lot of enterprise web development for the last two decades. However, in 2019 Microsoft made it clear that all of their new development will focus on ASP.NET Core and modern .NET (formerly known…
Machine learning (ML) is transforming industries by enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions, personalize user experiences, and improve operational efficiency. But for many organizations, the thought of adding ML capabilities to th…
We regularly test the functional requirements of our applications, but what about the architectural requirements like scalability, maintainability, and quality? Because these are harder to measure, we're must less likely to be testing these…
Have you ever maintained a software application where a change to one feature almost always broke another feature elsewhere in the application? Or have you ever tried to make a simple change to your software only to realize that it required…
In software projects, making informed and consistent architectural decisions over the long-haul is crucial to creating and maintaining good software. However, without proper documentation and a structured approach to these architectural dec…
In this post, I'll be diving deep into the world of hybrid mobile app development, pitting three of the most popular frameworks against each other: Ionic, React Native, and Flutter. Whether you're a seasoned developer looking to expand your…
In recent years, serverless architecture has emerged as a game-changer, promising scalability, cost-efficiency, and ease of deployment. However, amidst the hype surrounding serverless, it's crucial to recognize that it's not a one-size-fits…
Recently, Trailhead's very own Jonathan "J." Tower was at NDC Sydney, and sat down with Matt Wicks from SSW TV to discuss YARP: Your Gateway to Effortless Project Migrations. During this insightful conversation, J. walks Matt through Micros…
Cryptographic algorithms hide behind the curtain of so much of the digital communication that supports our daily lives online. As quantum computers continue to advance, the likelihood increases of computers that can defeat all of our curren…
At Trailhead, we understand that a successful business will often need to have a variety of software systems, leading to disparate systems that don't always talk to each other. This demands a seamless way to connect those systems to avoid o…
Many C# and .NET developers are grappling with aging ASP.NET projects still running on the .NET Framework. If that's you, you're not alone. Many of us have invested heavily in these applications, so the prospect of a full-scale upgrade can…
In the early days of the .NET Framework, releases were infrequent and timed with Windows releases. The shift to an open-source platform brought a welcome change. Now, we anticipate an annual .NET release tied to the .NET Conf event every No…
At Trailhead Technology Partners, we understand that in the fast-paced world of technology, every business must continuously innovate and evolve. However, in the quest for rapid development, there's a lurking challenge that can impede progr…
In the fast-paced world of software development, brevity is often hailed as a virtue. Software engineers, with their affinity for efficiency, are notorious for distilling complex concepts into succinct messages–sometimes even a little too s…
In the quickly evolving landscape of software, keeping pace with advancements is crucial to avoid having your application become a dreaded "legacy" application. Recently, Trailhead's very own Jonathan "J." Tower had the privilege of being a…
In October 2022, Microsoft announced that Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms apps will no longer be supported after May 1, 2024, which is just eight months from the writing of this post. The reason for this deadline is that Xamarin is being replaced…
In this blog, I want to dive into a debate that is happening in software teams all over the world right now as I write this sentence: Should we use GitHub or Azure DevOps for our source control, team collaboration, and DevOps? At Trailhead,…
In this blog, I want to shine a light on the practical benefits that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) brings to software development projects. I’ll show you how defining our applications’ infrastructure needs in the form of code can more easily…
Everyone is talking about containers and serverless, but when should you use each in your projects? Anyone who has worked with containers and orchestration much will tell you how much more complex they can make your application’s infrastruc…
When you’re using a shell command, it’s common to pass options to that command using dashes—which are also called hyphens. These options can be specified with either a single dash (-) or a double dash (—). But have you ever wondered when to…
Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel  Recently, a legacy ASP.NET Web API application that we support started logging an exception and also giving back a HTTP 500 response on some of its API endpoints. The exception, or at least an i…
It can be difficult to choose a development stack for your custom mobile apps today due to the number of possibilities currently available. Though there are many options, each of them falls into one of three basic categories: native, cross-…
Just like venturing into the wilderness requires the proper gear, developing REST APIs with ASP.NET Core also requires the right tools and equipment for your application to perform at its best.  At Trailhead, Redis caching is one such…
What’s the big deal about file uploads? Well, the big deal is that they are tricky operations. Implement file uploads the wrong way, and you may end up with memory leaks, server slowdowns, out-of-memory errors, and worst of all, unhappy use…
Most C# developers have of heard of .NET MAUI by now, but maybe not everyone knows exactly what it is, why it's so important, and how to get started using it. That's why we are so proud of our teammate Rodrigo Juarez for co-authoring a book…
One of the oldest debates for businesses that use software is the question of “buy versus build.”  On the one hand, you have off-the-shelf or software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings which are tried and true and spread the cost for their…
At Trailhead Technology Partners, we often help our customers navigate the complex world of migrating custom software applications to the cloud. For anyone thinking about undertaking such a project, I’ve outlined the whys and hows of Trailh…
For the first time in many years, the public has recently become aware of artificial intelligence (AI) again after OpenAI released their much-publicized chatbot, ChatGPT. Something about its uncanny intelligence and human-like fluency captu…
This article is part of C# Advent 2022. During the month of December, two new articles are posted each day until December 25th. These articles will be about something in the C# language, and are written by experts from around the C# co…
With the recent release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a powerful chatbot trained on a massive amount of internet data, many people are wondering whether they should be worried about the implications of this technology. In this blog post, we'll take…
At Trailhead, we think that .NET is the world’s most powerful and flexible framework for custom development. That’s why we are so excited that .NET 7 was officially released this week. When you see what’s new in .NET 7, we think you will ag…
Building custom business software is difficult. In my two-and-a-half decades of experience in the industry, I've seen many different mistakes that contributed to custom software development projects being late or even failing. As I've worke…
The world of cross-platform app development is undergoing a major revolution right now thanks to .NET MAUI—the next evolution of Xamarin.Forms.  Using .NET MAUI, developers can build a single project and compile it into native code and…
A lot is being said these days about microservices. It's enough of a popular trend online, at conferences, and in software architect chit-chat, that one could easily get the idea that microservices are always the superior architecture to th…
I recently upgraded a project to .NET 6 and immediately started getting an error on your hosted build pipeline in Azure DevOps. Error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET 6.0. Either target .NET 5.0 or lower, or…
I learned a lot in college that is applicable to my life and career…and some of it was even in my classes. Nowhere was that more true than with my time doing comedy improvisation. At the beginning of my sophomore year in college, I tr…
Microsoft Build 2021 just wrapped up, and a lot of the new coverage was about things like the upcoming major updates to Windows, the retirement of IE and pre-Chromium Edge, and the new Windows app store that is being developed. However, thi…
I finally have a time-tracking process that I love, and it only took me 22 years of trial and error to figure it out. With how often I hear others complain about tracking their time, I figured I needed to share this big news with the whole…
Software projects are notoriously difficult to estimate accurately. After years of building successful custom software projects, I've learned a lot of helpful DOs and DON'Ts for creating accurate estimates and had the opportunity to test th…
We were inspired recently when Microsoft announced that it was going carbon neutral by 2030, and completely paying back its historic carbon debt by 2040. Amazon has also made the similar, though slightly less lofty pledge to be carbon neutr…
When you're using a shell command, it's common to pass options to that command using dashes–which are also called hyphens. These options can be specified with either a single dash (-) or a double dash (–). But have you ever wondered when to…
Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel Recently, a legacy ASP.NET Web API application that we support started logging an exception and also giving back a HTTP 500 response on some of its API endpoints. The exception, or at least an inner e…
I've been working remotely–or telecommuting, as it is often known–for nearly 10 years, and in that time I've learned a few DOs and DON'Ts for being a successful remote worker. I'm far from perfect, and am still learning and getting it wrong…
When I talk to .NET developers, I find that there's still a lot of confusion about what .NET Standard is and how it relates to .NET Core. In fact, this weekend I'll be giving a talk at the Music City Tech conference in Nashville, Tennessee…
UPDATE, 2018 May 30: It's alive. The dotnet team officially announces 2.1 on their blog! The newest version of ASP.NET Core will be released in just a few days, the team announced this week. They're targeting Wednesday, May 30, 2018, with a…
At Trailhead, we've recently been noticing an increase in a couple of questions from our clients. They are: 1. Is Web Forms dead?, and 2. Is ASP.NET still a good framework to use to build a new application? First off, there is some confusio…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says "bots are the new apps." If that's the case, then developers are going to need a cross-platform way to build those bots, just like they have cross-platform frameworks for building mobile app. Good news, beca…
At Trailhead, we've been making the switch from Angular 1 to Angular 2 for our new web front-end projects. The selection of tools and components for Angular 2 has been slowly expanding, but it is still young and somewhat limited at times, w…
Trailhead Technology Partners is very pleased to announce the addition of our newest partner, Josh Eastburn. Current partners, J. and John, give their thoughts about the expanded partnership below, and welcome Josh to the team. Josh also sh…
In this Edition Introducing ASP.NET Core 1.0 Trailhead's Experience with .NET Core Our ASP.NET Core services: "ASP.NET Core" Online Training > Consulting Services > Introducing: ASP.NET Core 1.0 On June 27, Microsoft announced the o…
Recap of Build 2016 day-one announcements: Windows 10's 270M install base, Xamarin on Windows, the Anniversary Update, Bash on Windows, Microsoft Ink, the unified Windows/Xbox store, HoloLens dev kits shipping, conversation-as-a-platform, and Cortana growing up.
J. Tower About a year-and-a-half ago, I had a dream of starting a company with several of my favorite friends and colleagues, and today that dream is starting to come true. Please allow me to introduce Trailhead Technology Partners. Trailhe…
Ready to come with us?
Together, we can map your company’s software journey and start down the right trails. If you’re set to take the first step, simply fill out our contact form. We’ll be in touch quickly – and you’ll have a partner who is ready to help your company take the next step on its software journey.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
Together, we can map your company’s tech journey and start down the trails. If you’re set to take the first step, simply fill out the form below. We’ll be in touch – and you’ll have a partner who cares about you and your company.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
Montage Furniture Services provides furniture protection plans and claims processing services to a wide selection of furniture retailers and consumers.
Montage was looking to build a new web portal for both Retailers and Consumers, which would integrate with Dynamics CRM and other legacy systems. The portal needed to be multi tenant and support branding and configuration for different Retailers. Trailhead architected the new Montage Platform, including the Portal and all of it’s back end integrations, did the UI/UX and then delivered the new system, along with enhancements to DevOps and processes.
We’ve logged countless miles exploring the tech world. In doing so, we gained the experience that enables us to deliver your unique software and systems architecture needs. Our team of seasoned tech vets can provide you with:
We collaborate with you throughout the entire process because your customized tech should fit your needs, not just those of other clients.
The modern world demands versatile technology, and this is exactly what your mobile and cloud-based apps will give you.
We want your end users to have optimal experiences with tech that is highly intuitive and responsive.
This combination of Agile software development and IT operations provides you with high-quality software at reduced cost, time, and risk.
– BOB DOERKSEN, Vice President of Technology Services
at Montage Furniture Services
When you hit the trails, it is essential to bring appropriate gear. The same holds true for your digital technology needs. That’s why Trailhead builds custom solutions on trusted platforms like .NET, Angular, React, and Xamarin.
We partner with businesses who need intuitive custom software, responsive mobile applications, and advanced cloud technologies. And our extensive experience in the tech field allows us to help you map out the right path for all your digital technology needs.
We partner with businesses who need intuitive custom software, responsive mobile applications, and advanced cloud technologies. And our extensive experience in the tech field allows us to help you map out the right path for all your digital technology needs.
Ready to come with us?
Together, we can map your company’s tech journey and start down the trails. If you’re set to take the first step, simply fill out the contact form. We’ll be in touch – and you’ll have a partner who cares about you and your company.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
You’ll be getting an email from our team shortly. If you need immediate assistance, please call (616) 371-1037.
