Barret Blake
Architect
Barret has nearly 20 years of professional experience in the Microsoft & web technology stacks, including .NET, SQL Server, Azure, JavaScript, and Power Platform. He is a Microsoft MVP in the Power Automate and .NET areas. He is a blogger, content creator, and an active speaker and volunteer at conferences and user groups across Ohio and the US. He is an advocate for mentorship in the developer community and the need to build up the next generation of developers. When he's not doing all that he enjoys spending his time with family, LEGO, D&D, model railroading, and personal projects.
Posts
May 05, 2026Ardalis, Barret, Michelle, and Sadukie presented this year, and we were all in attendance. In this post, we're sharing some of our adventures from Stir Trek …
April 28, 2026With agent-driven workflows, you are able to describe an outcome and have the agent figure out the steps to reach that outcome.
April 23, 2026There are things that an AI coding agent simply isn't capable of doing out of the box. This is where MCP servers come in.
April 21, 2026Teach your agents how to do specific things - knowledge for repeatable tasks. This is the domain of skills files.
April 14, 2026You launch an AI, give it a prompt, and the result generally isn't great. AI agent instruction files help guide your agent to better results.
April 07, 2026Code reviews are among the highest value, yet most time consuming aspects of the modern development process. While it cannot, and should not, replace human …
March 31, 2026Unit testing has been around for a long time. We know how to do it. It's a well established pattern and it just works. But unit testing an LLM is nothing like …
March 24, 2026Experiment Driven Development lets you test new ideas and features on a small subset of users.
March 17, 2026Part of any good software development strategy includes making sure that your tests have a good set of data to test the code against.
March 10, 2026It can be useful to have the ability to enable or disable certain functionality in your application. Feature flags give us the ability to do so.
March 03, 2026Migrating between static site generators can be a challenge. AI made it quick and easy.
February 24, 2026There are many different approaches to software development. In the earliest days, there was the “Test Last” or “Code First” approach. A …