ASP.NET

One of the new features in .NET 6 is support for global using declarations. We can define using declarations as global and they work all over the project so we don’t have to define them in other files anymore. Here’s how it works.

During moving one system from classic ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET Core I faced an interesting challenge. Although access to system is based on Active Directory there is separate role management based on classic membership and roles providers. There are reasons why AD is not used for role management and I cannot change it. ASP.NET Core uses claims-based authentication and I needed to find a way to add role claims to authenticated identity. Here’s the solution.

Although .NET 5 is officially in RC and not yet officially supported on Azure cloud we can still deploy ASP.NET Core web applications built for .NET 5 to Azure App Services. I made my first ASP.NET Core 5.0 deployment to Azure App Service last week. There has been no problems on Azure side and my application is running very stable. Here’s how I did it.

When working with stateless sessions in NHibernate we need some way to see generated SQL but we cannot use simple tricks as custom NHibernate interceptor to log SQL queries. As I’m using mostly NHibernate LINQ these days I was interested in how to get SQL out from LINQ query without actually executing it. Here’s my solution.

Logging SQL created by NHibernate ORM is useful when debugging new features of application. SQL logging in NHibernate is a little bit tricky and not so straightforward as it is with Entity Framework Core. This blog post demonstrates how to write SQL created by NHibernate to ASP.NET Core loggers using NHibernate interceptor.

Dependency Injection (DI) was also supported by classic ASP.NET MVC but there was no framework-level dependency injection like in ASP.NET Core. In this blog post I will show how to use Structuremap for dependency injection in ASP.NET MVC applications and how to resolve dependencies using built-in components in classes that doesn’t support dependency injection.

On the search for running development environments on cloud I stumbled upon service calles Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s nice service that moves development and debugging workloads to cloud and it makes it possible to use lightweight machines like tablets and hybrids for development. Here’s my overview of how to build ASP.NET Core web applications on codespaces and Visual Studio Code.

A little surprise during COVID-19 time coding. I cloned repo to my dev box, opened it in Visual Studio and hit F5. IIS Express starts and browser opens but it shows just error about site to be unreachable. After almost getting grey hair I found out what’s wrong. Here’s the solution.

Something funny to end this week. When checking my Twitter feeds I found a kinky tweet about logging .NET Core messages to Notepad window. Yes, you heard right – .NET Core logger for Notepad. It’s not real, you want to say, but it is. And here’s how it works :)

Times ago I blogged about micro ORM-s. I have been busy through all Covid-19 times learning technical side of DDD and during that I met again my old friend Dapper. There are applications where Dapper is used to query read-only data without overhead coming with ORM-s. Also there are simple applications where for one or another reason developers decided to keep as close to raw SQL as possible. This blog post is brief introduction to Dapper anbd how to use it in ASP.NET Core applications.

Some properties of model classes come as enums and we want to show enum values in select list when edit form is opened. Sometimes we want enum element names but sometimes we want to use custom names or even translations. his blog post demonstrates how to get enum element names to select list on ASP.NET Core.

Using query string in controller unit tests is actually easy until we don’t need anything more advanced. We can buld up a string with query parameters and go with it. But what if things get more complex and we need encoding or multiple values? Here’s how to build safe query string for ASP.NET COre controller unit tests.

Multitenant wep applications detect current tenant usually by URL checking name of first level folder or subdomain. Usually tenants are defined by subdomain as it is easier to distribute them over data center, cloud services or hosting accounts. This blog post demonstrates how to build Azure DNS service client to create DNS records for multitenant application subdomains.

After getting fake authenticated user to ASP.NET Core integration tests I made step further and introduced the way to use different user accounts. Using multiple users and roles instead of one test users is very common scenario in web applications. During my carreer I have seen only few business applications that doesn’t use different roles. This blog post demonstrates how to inject users dynamically to ASP.NET Core integration tests.

After getting done with fake users for ASP.NET Core controller unit tests I wanted to make fake users available also in integration tests. It took some inventing and hacking but I made it work. This blog post shows you how to create fake users for ASP.NET Core integration tests and write effective extension methods to keep integration tests shorter.

I think most of ASP.NET Core applications have authentication enabled. When writing unit tests for controllers we have one set of tests that need authenticated user and other set of tests that need anonymous user. Faking User property of controller is a little bit tricky. This blog post shows how to do it.

Last year I had some projects where I had to embed Power BI reports to ASP.NET Core applications. There were easy cases that solved practically with copy-paste but I also had more complex situation where server-side code was needed because application uses custom authentication instead of Azure AD. This blog post covers both scenarios for embedding Power BI reportis to ASP.NET Core applications.

In one of my projects I have some ASP.NET Core views that display multiple tables with reporting data. Data comes from SQL Server views and stored procedures and these can be modified in database without deploying application to server again. I came out with very common solution in ASP.NET Core to solve this problem using raw SQL commands and shared views for DataTable and DataSet. Here’s what I did.

My previous posts about tenant-based dependency injection and using composite command in ASP.NET Core culminated with idea to use configurable composite commands in multi-tenant ASP.NET Core applications. Configurable composite commands make it easy to tweak save and update processes that contain multiple steps of what some can be custom and their activation is based on tenant configuration. Here’s how to build thost composite commands.

One need in multitenant applications is injecting dependencies based on tenant configuration. It can be actually more complex as instances may need constructor parameters. Here is my example of dynamic injection of multiple file clients in ASP.NET Core multi-tenant web application.

ASP.NET Core supports gRPC protocol that is about to replace legacy SOAP services with more performant and powerful protocol that is easier to use and support. This blog post shows how to build gRPC service and client on Visual Studio and ASP.NET Core.