What's New in ASP.NET Core 3 Preview 6
ASP.NET Core 3 seems to be taking a similar tact to version 1 as it is adding a lot of functionality and phasing it in with different previews. While a lot of the articles seem to be focusing on the non-ASP.NET features (e.g. WPF, WinForms, etc.), I thought it would be nice to let those of you who are ASP.NET devs know what is in Preview 6 just for you.
It feels a lot like the ASP.NET MVC/API side is being treated as mature and stable as there is are not a lot of surface changes. Microsoft does seem to be doubling down on Razor Pages and Blazor. It feels like they want .NET Core to be a good fit for different styles and backgrounds of developer. This release is no different.
Avoid Lazy Loading in ASP.NET
I know I am not going to make everyone happy with this post. I've been hoping to not have to make this post, but Entity Framework Core has finally added support for Lazy Loading, so it's time.
This problem is not new. Entity Framework (not Core) also has this problem. But it's far easier to accidentally do this in that version. Luckily, Entity Framework Core has made it harder to inadvertently turn it on. Let's see what's wrong with Lazy Loading in Web Apps.
Converting ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 to RTM Bits
If you’re like me, you’ve changed your projects from RC1 to RC2 only to find out that the RTM was coming quickly. Well we are here so we need some steps to convert projects.
Like other posts, I am going to list all the changes I found but there are likely more that I didn’t run into. Feel free to use the comment system to add more as you like!
ASP.NET Core 1.0 Released!
This day has been a long time coming but I want to congratulate the team at Microsoft for delivering the first version of ASP.NET Core! I’m very excited to start working with the bits on real projects.
If you haven’t had a chance to look at play with ASP.NET Core, it’s time! For the ASP.NET MVC and Web API users, the transition is pretty quick, but if you’re coming from ASP.NET Web Forms or another technology, there is a learning curve.
ASP.NET 5 Webinar
I had a great time today talking about ASP.NET 5 on a Pluralsight webinar. Over 1,000 people were able to attend. Thank you all for tuning in!
The webinar showed the very basics of what ASP.NET 5 is and why it exists. I had fun answering all the questions and wish we had time to answer more.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta 8 to RC1
UPDATED: Missed fixes.
It’s that time again. ASP.NET 5 has a new release and this one has a go-live license! As announced today, the RC1 is available and a new RC2 is coming in the future.
ASP.NET 5 and Bower
As most of you already know, I have a new course on ASP.NET 5. I’ve just released a teaser video that shows how the Bower.json editor in Visual Studio works.
The course was recently updated to use the ASP.NET Beta 8 bits. I am looking forward to the next update of ASP.NET and expect to continue to update the course all the way through the RTM.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Mapping Between Entities and View Models
As many of you know, my recent course on Pluralsight dealt with Best Practices in ASP.NET: Entities, Validation and View Models. As I’ve worked with clients, there seem to be a non-ending list of ways to deal with data in ASP.NET.
One of the topics that I am passionate about as it relates to the course is how to manage the Model to Entity relationship. While being pragmatic is important, I still believe that there are many situations where you want a separate Model for a view (server or client-side) instead of just using the Entities that you’re storing data with.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta4 to Beta5
For my upcoming course, I have a decent sized example that I’ll be teaching from. In the process of watching ASP.NET 5 go through the sprints, I have to upgrade the project at every step. I feel at some point I should be getting better at dealing with the sprints, but not yet ; )
Here is a short post that includes the different things I had to deal with in upgrading the project. It’s not just the ASP.NET 5 update, but also EF7 and a couple of small details.
My Entities, Validation and View Models Course
A few weeks back, I released a new course on Pluralsight. This new course talks through what I consider “Best Practices” (though there are no absolutes) for ASP.NET Entities, View Models, and Validation.
I was tremendously pleased to find it made it into the top ten courses for a few days. It seems to be resonating with some students and that makes me really happy. If you’re writing ASP.NET code, this course could make your job easier!
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 3 - EF7
NOTE: This post has been updated for changes in Beta 7 and later.
Every web project needs some sort of data framework and ASP.NET 5 is no exception. Like it’s forbearers, ASP.NET 5 uses Entity Framework, but this version of the Entity Framework is different. It’s being re-engineered from the ground up just like the ASP.NET 5 stack.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 2 - Startup
In this second post in my six-part series on ASP.NET 5, we’ll take a look at how your ASP.NET 5 applications will be configured upon startup. The startup in this new version of ASP.NET 5 is very different, but hopefully is clearer and easier to debug. At least that’s my impression so far.
If you haven’t read the prior topics, it would probably be helpful to start with the earlier articles. You can see a list of the links to the articles below:
ASP.NET 5: First Impressions
I’ve been working on a new web site wholly using the ASP.NET 5 (e.g. vNext, MVC6, etc.) for the past couple of weeks. This means using Visual Studio 2015 Preview and the new project types in ASP.NET 5.
The idea around the site is to be an example of an ASP.NET 5 site using MVC6, EF7, and Visual Studio 2015. It’s not perfect and ASP.NET 5 isn’t ready yet so I expect to continue to fix and remove hacks for quite a while, but it’s been fun to dig into a whole new stack while it’s still getting the kinks worked out. Here are some of my first impressions.
Time Zones and Servers
I am getting married and that means I get a bunch of development tasks to do for the wedding planning. I guess it’s my own fault, I did propose with an app.
One of the tasks I had to do was create a new page on my wedding site for the day of the wedding to include things like directions and parking. Pretty simple HTML stuff, but one thing I wanted to be sure of was to only show the page on the day of the wedding. This should be easy, but the time zone of the server has kicked my ass before.
Phil Haack and a Bad Joke on This Week's Podcast
As a fan of the direction of ASP.NET, I’ve been an avid fan of Phil Haack’s for some time now. His clarity of communicating why the web should work definitely helped ASP.NET become the great framework it is today. He’s now doing the same thing at GitHub!
I get to finally use my bad joke about his last name on this week’s podcast. We also talk about his start, the move to Seattle to work at Microsoft and how to keep Californian’s out of Washington state.
New Course on .NET Code Reviews
One of the things that I help companies with are code reviews. I love doing code reviews. It let’s me look at a large codebase with fresh eyes and help a company out with a set of recommendations for improving their process, teams and code.
After doing enough of these some patterns emerged. From this has come my new Pluralsight course on Lessons Learned from Real World .NET Code Reviews.
Web API 2's Attribute Routing: Looking Deeper
I recently recorded a new module for ASP.NET Web API course (on Pluralsight) to cover the new features of Web API 2 (it’s not out yet, soon…I promise).
It was fun plumbing the depths of how it works. I generally like the feature but the implementation may change some of your code if you’re dealing with routes under the covers (i.e. for auth or versioning).
My New Web Development Course is Live
Are you getting ready to build a new website? Are you interested in shortening your development by using Bootstrap, AngularJS, Azure and ASP.NET? If so, my new course might be just for you.
In this new course I build a new web site from scratch. I start out with a Bootstrap template (since my design skills suck) and move through creating content, building a database, exposing a REST-ful API and building a Single Page Application. I wrap it up by publishing the site to Azure Web Sites showing you how to not only get your application up an running in the cloud, but also how to monitor it and handle standard tasks like using your own domain in Azure.
ASP.NET MVP
Today I was renewed as an MVP for the tenth time and could not be happier. Over the past year I've been looking last XAML into the web stack and Microsoft has graciously moved me from a Data MVP over to an ASP.NET MVP. This doesn't mean I won't be sharing on Silverlight, WPF or data technologies; it's just a reflection of what I am working with now.
I want to thank everyone in the community for following me and reading my blog over past year...you're the reason I've been renewed again and I sincerely appreciate it!
