Music City Code 2018
Just got home from Music City Code conference had a great time catching up with attendees and other speakers. If you haven't made it to this great Nashville event before, plan for next year. It's well worth it.
As promised, here are the slides and code from my talks. I did talks on "Enhancing Web Pages with VueJS: When You Don't Need a full SPA" and "Versioning APIs with ASP.NET Core 2.1". Here you go:
Vue and ASP.NET Core - A New Course
In case you haven't been following on Twitter, you might not know that I've been working on a Vue course for a couple of months now. This particular course is now available as an Early Access model I'm trying out.
Instead of waiting and releasing the whole course, I'm publishing the course module-by-module. The idea is that Early Access gives you access to each module as I finish them.
Beyond Bower Webcast
Thanks to everyone who came to my webcast today! As many of you know, Bower is depreciated so I've been looking at the different ways to move to other solutions.
In the webcast (which will be streamable soon), I discuss using NPM, Yarn, LibMan (an upcoming tool for Visual Studio), and Gulp to get and package your client-side assets.
Building a .NET Core Configuration Source
As I've been teaching ASP.NET Core for a while now, some things I've been saying I've taken on faith. One of these was that building a Configuration Source (a provider that can read configuration and feed it into the configuration system) is fairly easy.
With a break in building my Vue course, I was curious so I decided to build a configuration source that I hope no one uses. It is a configuration source that reads the AppSettings in a web.config file. This is a thought exercise, not a recommendation.
Using JwtBearer Authentication in an API-only ASP.NET Core Project
In my Pluralsight courses1 on ASP.NET Core, I show how to use JWT Tokens to secure your API. In building a new example for my upcoming Vue.js course, I decided to only use JWT (not cookies and JWT like many of my examples are).
But I kept getting redirects on failure to call an API made me realize that I wasn't sure how to make JWT the only provider. After some fiddling I figured it out. This blog post is mostly to remind me of how to do it.
Using UseStaticFiles with NPM Client Dependencies - Talk Me Out of It
Ok, please tell me how stupid this is. It's apt to be pretty stupid but I have a point to it. I'm trying to separate the ideas of prototyping quickly from preparing for production.
I've been using Bower to do examples of client-side dependencies. Bower is depreciated so for new dev, I don't want to recommend it (and VS2017 has removed it too). Bower is clean as you don't have to introduce a bunch of ideas like gulp or npm scripts to get someone with a working example quickly (Bower's .rc file let's you tell it where to put the dependencies). I want to do the same thing with NPM.
ASP.NET Core in Charlotte
I'm getting around to this a little late, but late last month I had a great time presenting in Charlotte's Enterprise Developer's Guild. I showed them how ASP.NET Core 2 works.
They had a full house and I got to talk about how ASP.NET Core 2 and .NET Core itself works. Great questions about why bother with ASP.NET Core and how it's related to the new "Core" moniker that Microsoft seems to be putting on everything (answer is, probably no relation, just a marketing group that is latching on to the name).
Using Services in ASP.NET Core Razor Pages
I feel like the job of software developer in the last 20 years has been to decouple. Whether it's dependency injection or building modular systems, or even the new trend of micro-services; coupling has been the killer of everything good in software development (maybe).
In many small ways, I find that trying to fit in small disconnected sets of functionality into the ASP.NET MVC Controller to View mechanism can be overwhelming. In some cases I'll need something that is completely separate from the logic of the controller. Luckily ASP.NET Core comes to the rescue.
Re-thinking Running Migrations and Seeding in ASP.NET Core 2.0
Back in ASP.NET 4, I really liked the way that it supported running migrations and seeding of the database for you. But in ASP.NET Core and EF Core, that hasn't come to the table yet.
I doubt it actually needs to happen because since ASP.NET Core gives you much more control over the life cycle of the web project. In Entity Framework Core, I've been using an approach to run migrations and seed the database that I kind of crufted together in the Betas. I don't think it's working.
End of the Year Review
With the New Year coming, I thought I'd look back at the last year in my life. Warning this is going to be technical and personal, that way I can turn 50% of the people off with every sentence...just a different set of people with every paragraph ; )
I've had a tough few years, but overall this has been a good year in the Wildermuth house (removing entirely our Political climate which I won't talk about here). It's not been easy, but it's been good. That's the way it usually is for me.
Reverse Engineering Existing Databases in Entity Framework Core 2
In my ASP.NET Core 2.0 Pluralsight course, I specifically teach how to build DbContext classes and the POCO classes that go with them. But I've been getting many questions about how to work with existing databases, so I thought I'd explain it in a blog post.
I purposely teach the DbContext and POCO classes first because I want the students to understand what is happening. The process of using it with an existing database generates sometimes a large amount of code.
ASP.NET Core 2.0 and the End of Bower
Bower is still being maintained, but they're recommending that people move their projects to Yarn and Webpack. As you may not know, I'm on a sort of campaign to avoid the complexity of something like Webpack until you really need it.
In addition, some libraries aren't supported by Bower (e.g. Angular 2-5) so I wanted to finally end my use of two package managers when I needed Angular. My decision has been to use NPM instead of Bower since that's where Angular lives at and is a huge ecosystem thanks to node.
Using Azure Storage in ASP.NET Core
This blog has existed for 15 years now and I've moved it from server to server, service to service, in many forms over the years. As I moved servers, one of my biggest pains was copying all the images and downloads from server to server.
My site code took up about 1% of the space, and all those embedded images and downloads took a majority of the space. I was sick of it, especially on deploying the site (or saving the site in Git), so I decided to switch to storing it in Azure Storage (or AWS if you prefer).
Two AuthorizationSchemes in ASP.NET Core 2
When ASP.NET Core 2 shipped the early previews, I knew one large change was going to be the Identity subsystem. The Identity for ASP.NET Core 1 worked ok, but the setup was very confusing with identical configuration is more than one place.
I’m happy to say that in ASP.NET Core 2 it’s much better. Implementing JWT Tokens for APIs was more confusing than I liked back when I wrote my Implementing an API in ASP.NET Core course for Pluralsight. I was hoping that it changed to simplify the way it works.
ASP.NET Core 2.0 Released
I’m very excited that the v2 of ASP.NET Core is now released. Married with Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 (or VS Core), it is now a maturing platform.
I really like what the team has been doing since the release of 1.0. They seem to really have thought about the pain points of the initial versions and worked to eliminate as many as they could.
Scenic City Summit 2017
Just got back from Chattanooga, TN for Scenic City Summit. I got to do two talks there and had some great audiences and questions.
Was great to catch up with some of the best speakers in the southeast at the event. I hope the attendees enjoyed it as much as I did.
My Talk at Birmingham .NET User Meetup
I had the opportunity to present ASP.NET Core 2.0 to a great group in Birmingham, AL tonight. The attendees were almost as good as the BBQ!
Doing a talk on a preview (ASP.NET Core 2.0) on top of another preview (VS 2017 Preview) is always risky, but it went well. Lots of great questions and hopefully I convinced some of the attendees to give it a try.
ASP.NET Core 2 + VS2017 + Angular-CLI?
I’m working on an update for my ASP.NET Core course for version 2.0. One major change is to use Angular (v4 probably) in the new course.
My challenge was to get Angular and ASP.NET Core to work together. I like the idea about Angular-CLI doing all the boilerplate since setup is a bit of a headache. Should be an easy win-win. Well…
Program.cs in ASP.NET Core 2.0
I am sure that many people like me are digging into ASP.NET Core 2.0 and curious about what has been changed. I’m going to start with the very start of your ASP.NET Core project, the program.cs.
Digging into the meat of ASP.NET Core 2.0 might lead you to identity, the better .NET Core support, and other changes. But I think the startup is where you can start to see the platform mature.
Using VS Code and ASP.NET Core?
Developers are an odd beast. Some developers love a big IDE and lots of automation to help them create great solutions.
The other type of developer, wants to write code quickly and spends a lot of time at the command-line. Luckily, Microsoft supports both types of developer.
Techorama 2017
I had the pleasure of being invited to Techorama in Antwerp, Belgium this year. As usual, Gil and the team had a great event with over 1,500 attendees.
I love this conference because the attendees are so plugged in and I get great questions every time I do a talk there. I want to thank everyone for coming to see me talk on ASP.NET Core even though I had lost my voice. We muscled through though and hopefully some people are digging in deeper with it now.
Wroc# Wrap-Up
The great organizers of Wrocsharp invited us to come to Poland and present at an unusual conference. I had a great time and everyone was just lovely to me and my wife!
Wroclaw Poland (not pronounced anything like you’re thinking) is a lovely little city that has an interesting history. We enjoyed chasing down some of the hundred or so dwarves that line the front of shops and churches (seen to the right – yes, that’s a dwarf using a tiny ATM).
ASP.NET Core Snippets for Visual Studio Code
I’m currently creating a new course on how to use Visual Studio Code with ASP.NET Core. While I rely on yeoman for project scaffolding and some file scaffolding, I wanted to get some of the snippets I’ve grown used to having in the full Visual Studio.
I found a project called ASP.NET Core Snippets to my excitement, but it only had snippets for some of the main files in your project. Not action snippets or razor snippets. So at 4am last night I wrote a Visual Studio Code extension to add some of these snippets.
Updating My Blog to Visual Studio 2017 and .csproj
Now that the ASP.NET Core tooling changes are finally here, I decided to update my blog to the new bits. Goodbye project.json and hello .csproj.
Finding the project after upgrading it, I had to look for those points of contact I had gotten comfortable using. The upgrade wasn’t painful (look back at those Beta 7-Beta 8 upgrades for that story), but knowing where they moved your cheese is important. Hopefully this post helps you with the same issues.
New Course on Building an API with ASP.NET Core
Are you new to ASP.NET Core? Maybe you’re building an API for your SPA, mobile app, or just your web app. I recently released a new Pluralsight course that can help you.
This new, six-hour, course covers the basics of building REST APIs with ASP.NET Core. Whether you’re just exposing your data via REST, or building microservices, this new course should have you covered.
My Courses
| Vue.js by Example (Early Access Now Available) |
| Bootstrap 4 by Example (Just Released) |
| Intro to Font Awesome 5 (Free Course) |
