ASP.NET Core Application Development: Building an application in four sprints

• 02 April 2018

Part 1: Alpine Ski House

References

• Example project: https://github.com/AspNetMonsters/AlpineSkiHouse

Chapter 1: How we got here

ASP.NET MVC

Editor and View templates

The power of user controls not initially available in MVC, but rectified by the introduction of editor and view templates. Fantasic and underused. Allows you to assign a template to a view in a model. When Razor needs to show an editor or view for a particular field, checks for a special template.

@Html.DisplayFor(model => model.StartDate)
@Html.EditorFor(model => model.StartDate)

Either defined by convention OR by annotating a field in the model with a UIHint

Filters

A filter is an annotation either to a controller or an action method and can intercept and change any request, adding or updating data or changing the flow of the request. Often used by security e.g. [Authorize].

Middleware

Middleware, built on the OWIN standard, largely replaces custom IIS modules.

Web API

• Initially used WCF with a set of rational default, but subsequently morphed into vanilla Web API project
• Very similar to MVC project, but with Views and other UI elements missing. Action names in Controllers correspond to HTTP verbs e.g. Get() and Post().
• Like WCF, supports self hosting, so possible to bin deploy.
• One of the first open source projects from Microsoft
• Much of the functionality is mirrored in ASP.NET MVC, can bend MVC controllers to perform as Web API
• Can by used alongside ASP.NET MVC in the same project

ASP.NET Core

• Next evolution
• Not only open source, but developed using GitHub. See https://github.com/aspnet/home
• Far more reaching modernization effort designed to make ASP.NET competitive with other popular web frameworks e.g. Node, Elixr, Go
• Goes hand in hand with modernisation efforts on .NET runtime: .NET Core
• Worthy of at least one book!!!

Chapter 2: Influences

Rails

• Rails emerged from the 37 signals company in the early 2000s, used to build Basecamp and open sourced by its creators
• Revolutionary at the time, despite MVC being a pattern from the 70s
• Highly opinionated using convention over configuration which ASP.NET also utilised e.g.
  • any public method returning an ActionResult is a public endpoint
  • Index method is default route for a controller
  • View method without arguments uses naming rules to locate .cshtml file to render
• Routing was fundamental to Rails - flexible URLs
• ActiveRecord models which were used from UI to database

Node.js

• Event-driven, multi-platform, single-threaded runtime for JavaScript
• Many tools in ASP.NET core build process actually use Node
• Influential in the development of ASP.NET’s web socket implementation, SignalR
  • popularised the idea of server push and WebSockets for real time communication using socket.io package

Angular and React

Open source

OWIN

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