EC: Yep. So tell us a little about yourself, James. What do you do? Where do you work?

JC: I actually am an independent consultant and I work primarily in the space of ASP.NET Core these days and I do a lot of work in Azure. And I guess I’ve got the MVP award a couple of time or so, and recently released my fourth book with good friends of mine Dave Paquette and Simon Timms on the topic of ASP.NET Core.

EC: So Dave and Simon, you do a lot of work with these guys. You have a little bit of a show that you do as well on Channel 9.

JC: We do. We call ourselves the ASP.NET Monsters. We’ve got these little caricatures that are done. Anyways, so we have this cartoon persona where we go on and we code and pretend to know what we’re doing and share what we’re learning about ASP.NET Core with other people. And so yeah, we’re about 100 episodes in on Channel 9 and plugging along.

EC: Nice, congratulations.

JC: Thanks.

EC: It’s a great show, especially if you’re a.NET developer. Tune in and learn some cool tips and tricks. I learned a little bit about a cool open-source project that you guys had called GenFu.

JC: That’s right. So it’s a data generation library, it’s available on GitHub and via NuGet and it’s for.NET core. We’re working on back-porting it to support other frameworks as well, but what it does is you can basically take any type of entity and say give me a list of that entity, and rather than filling it in with nonsense data, it will actually do its best to intelligently recognize known properties, and then using an internal database, fill those with either random values that are generated or generated based off of values in the database. So it gives you realistic looking test data and sometimes that can make a strong impression when you’ve got a first draft of a prototype or you’re working with some sample data. So a handy little utility. I’ve been using it, some form of it, for over 15 years and then I finally got poked to put it out there a couple of years ago and Dave and Simon stepped in and that’s really where we started collaborating, and it’s just evolved from there.