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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in the Swing of It
It’s been a tough couple of months here at Wildermuth central. I’m finally feeling good enough to get back on my proverbial feet. The hair is longer, the beard grayer, and hopefully a little more wise.
You should hear a lot more of me now that I’m back home in Atlanta. I have a lot of web development experience to share with the blog. I hope you will enjoy what is coming.
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!
We're Coming Home!
So, it’s over. After a year on the road I am coming home. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my decision. While visiting friends in Thailand, I fell through a footbridge and broke my shoulder. With surgery and physical therapy coming we decided it will be easier in Atlanta than in Bangkok.
For me the real shame is that we have to cancel the Hello America Road Trip. I was really looking forward to crossing the country and meeting some great developers. Don’t worry we’ll reschedule it.
How'd You Build That Map?
When I started the Wilder World Tour, I built a simple map so my Mom could know where I was during the trip. I thought others might be interested too.
I’d been meaning to find an extra day or two to wrap this all in a little wrapper and share it. I finally found time the last couple of days. The result is travelMap, a library that allows you to build your own travel maps including showing current location, lines between locations, and popup information about each stop.
AngularJS and VS Code in Singapore
I’m currently in southeast Asia for my world tour. While in Singapore, I had the pleasure to chat with a great group of developers about AngularJS.
I love when I get great questions and the developers at this event were really keyed into the web stack and asked the hard questions about AngularJS (and of course AngularJS 2.0).
Announcing the Hello America Road Trip
UPDATE: Registration is open for most cities now. We’re happy to also welcome new guests including David Giard, Joel Cochran, John Petersen, and G. Andrew Duthie! Don’t forget to signup. Only two and a half months to the first event in Seattle with Scott Guthrie!
.NET Fringe is Coming!
As many of you know, I’m not in the country at the moment but if I were, I’d be going to .NET Fringe in Portland, Oregon on April 12-14th. This new conference is all about open source in the .NET space and I and really excited that a conference is focused on it.
I have a couple of small, older .NET open source libraries, but my real facination has been with where the overall community is going. Both Microsoft and the community at large are all going open source and it’s great news for us all I think.
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.
Fun Talk Today in Delhi
I’m on the World Tour and this stop is in Delhi, India! While here I had the fun opportunity to give a talk on AngularJS to a great group at Sapient in Delhi, India.
Via Pluralsight and the great Pinal Dave helped organize this event. If I go long enough without giving a talk, I start to get the shakes. The group had great questions which I always like.
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:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 1 - Getting Started
Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the new ASP.NET 5 (also known as ASP.NET vNext) bits using Visual Studio 2015. I’m trying to make sense of the new changes and how they will affect how I build websites. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned about the new stack.
I’m going to do this by talking through an example website I wrote using the new bits. Do know that we’re still pretty early and Visual Studio 2015 (CTP6 as of this writing) and ASP.NET 5 Beta 3 are both in a state of flux. This is definitely about what’s coming, not what is here so far.
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.
Visual Studio and WebStorm: Am I Mad?
I might be. In many of the projects I help with we have to handle back-end and front-end coding for web projects. This means I need the best in breed in tools no matter where I’m writing code.
In many cases this is Visual Studio. I love this tool and have for years. While it’s not without it’s own foibles, it does most things really well. But not everything.
Great Time in Germany
This week, I’m in Köln, Germany for two short events. This is one of my favorite cities and I spent time here back in the early ‘90s as a street musician. I didn’t need an excuse to visit this great city, but I had one anyway.
First was the Web Developers Kompact where I showed off AngularJS in an hour. The next day I did walkthrough of ASP.NET Web API at the .NET Developers Kompact. The attendees were great and even though there were fewer questions than I normally get, the quality of the questions was great.
Goodbye Netflix API (And HowToWat.ch Too)
Today is the day that Netflix has decided to shut down their public API. They stopped giving out API keys a long time ago, but except for a select few apps, all others are dead…including mine.
As I shut it down today I have no regrets. I actually am surprised by how long it has lasted because the road was rocky and I learned a lot.
What's New in WebStorm 9 Webinar
Recently Pluralsight has been doing a series of Webinars on a variety of subjects. This week I’ll be doing one in their Dev series. Join me this Tuesday when I’ll be talking about the new features in WebStorm 9 and demonstrating it.
My Courses
