The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
The Week at DEVIntersection
I want to thank all the great attendees I met at this week’s DEVIntersection (Fall 2015) conference in Vegas! Richard Campbell and company put on a great show!
I had the opportunity to do three talks and two of them went well (if you were at my Bootstrap talk, you know what I’m talking about). In any case, I wanted to share the slide and code with the attendees so here it is:
Upgrading from ASP.NET 5 Beta 7 to Beta 8
If you’ve been following along, you know by now that I’m investing my time into learning ASP.NET 5. Now that the ASP.NET team have released a new version, let me help you move your code to the new version.
The update this time includes some simple package changes but also some major API changes. I am sure I can’t cover them all here, but hopefully I’ll help you avoid the major ones.
Let’s walk through the changes I am doing when upgrading a project:
New Course on ASP.NET 5!
If you read my blog, you probably already know how excited I am about ASP.NET 5. To dovetail with that, I’ve created a nine-hour course on Pluralsight that covers this brand-new technology from Redmond.
This new course is similar to my end-to-end course on ASP.NET 4/MVC5 that I released a couple of years ago. The goal of the course is to teach you all the concepts while helping you build a simple web app.
You can find the course here:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 5 - The API
The more I work with ASP.NET 5, the more it looks and feels like the old ASP.NET stack except for the hosting. That’s a good thing in most cases, but writing the API that changes.
After dealing with WCF’s bastardized tried to add REST on top of the SOAP stack, I was elated to be introduced to ASP.NET’s Web API some years back. While it let me develop APIs while thinking about REST in more natural forms, it had the problem of being so separated from the MVC stack that many of the facilities had to be duplicated in both stacks. This cognitive dissonance caused many a developer headaches (same class name but in two different namespaces). When I realized that ASP.NET 5 would be merging the two ideas, I was elated…maybe prematurely.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 4 - MVC 6
I had planned on finishing these a long time ago, but working on my Pluralsight course about ASP.NET 5 distracted me. Sorry about that.
If you’ve been doing web development in .NET, you probably have at least a passing experience with ASP.NET’s MVC framework. At it’s core, it’s a common way to build and architect web applications. The new stack is built on the same metaphors from the older versions. If you’ve been using MVC before, you won’t be lost and some of the additions are welcome.
I’ll explain what I’m doing in a series of blog posts and link them all here as I write them. The plan is to write posts about:
Part 3: Using Entity Framework 7
Part 4: ASP.NET MVC 6 (This Post)
Part 6: Web Tooling with VS2015 (coming soon)
ASP.NET 5 Identity and REST APIs
As I’ve been digging into building apps with ASP.NET 5, I’ve had to get used to some of the new metaphors. Some of these make sense (especially if you’ve used Node before), but some are brand new to me. One of these metaphors I ran into was the idea of Identity notifications.
The problem I was running into was one I thought many people would run into: using Identity (e.g. authentication/authorization) with REST APIs. Here is the scenario:
I was using Cookie Authentication (similar to old ASP.NET’s Forms Authentication) to log in users and to protect certain pages of the site to non-anonymous users. It’s simple to set up and works well.
Angular v. React v. Aurelia v. et al.
When I announced my upcoming course, I had a lot of people ask me about what I thought of X framework versus Angular (which I’m covering in the course). I feel like I have to say something.
Before I bestow my blessing, let’s talk about the fundamental problem of frameworks in general. They can be a boon or a bust and many developers have been hurt by a selection of a specific framework in the past. I know I’m being asked so that some devs can go to their architect to confirm their particular positions. I’m hoping to avoid that in this post, but I doubt it will work.
This selection of a framework isn’t new. It’s ancient in fact. I had to battle the same problem in my past; whether it was Oracle v. SQL Server in my ADOGuy days, MVVMLight vs ever other MVVM library in Silverlight, or even Mongo v. every other NoSQL Store. The argument is the same:
New ASPNET5 Course Coming
I’m diligently working towards my new Pluralsight course and I am very excited about it. The new course is an end-to-end building of a web app using ASP.NET 5, MVC6, Entity Framework 7, Angular 1.4, and Bootstrap 3.x.
This course is a bit different than other courses I’ve done because we’re releasing it before the RTM of ASP.NET 5. Because of this, I wanted to let my students know what to expect.
The course will build a web app from an empty ASP.NET 5 project through to a deployed app. This mirrors my ASP.NET MVC5 course from a couple of years ago, but is written with the new stack. The course will build a whole new project as well. This time, you’ll be building a tool for trip planning called “The World”.
Atlanta Code Camp Call for Speakers is Open
We’re excited to announce that the 10th Annual Atlanta Code Camp is coming this fall on October 24th, 2015! We’re holding it at Kennesaw State University in Marietta, Georgia.
Whether you’re a veteran of technical talks or itching to get your feet wet with your first session, you should submit your ideas to the code camp. We like to have a mix of venerable and new speakers.
Registration for the event will open soon, but the Call for Speakers is now open at:
Windows Phone, Surface, and Fanboydom
I admit it, I don’t know if that last word in the title is real, but anyway. I’ve used a Windows Phone since betas of Windows Phone 7. Like some of you I have the question of whether to believe the new Microsoft’s lukewarm support for the platform. Will Win10 be the savior of the platform or final coffin nail? I don’t have an answer to that.
I like to think that all that time has given me perspective, but I am not sure that’s true. I liken myself to a detached observer, but the reality is that I own a Windows Phone, a Windows Laptop, an Xbox One (and 360 before it), a Microsoft Band, and I even have a Spot Watch somewhere in a box. Does that make me a fanboy? I hope not, but certainly not a detached observer with a honest perspective.
Where does that leave me? That’s for my readers to judge. I am sure it’s somewhere in the middle but certainly leaning towards being a Microsoft fanboy.