ASP.NET

ASP.NET Core 2 will come with full support for VB.NET. In current preview we can use VB.NET to build .NET Core applications. I was still successful on mixing up C# and VB.NET project files and port C# code over to VB.NET and build proof-of-concept level web API applicaton that returns fake data about current weather in different cities.

ASP.NET Core 2 comes with Razor Pages that allow developers to build simple web applications with less overhead compared to MVC. The emphazise is on the word “simple” as Razor Pages doesn’t come with patterns suitable for bigger and more complex applications. For this we have MVC that is flexible enough to build applications that will grow over years. This blog post uses simple shoutbox application to illustrate how to build applications using Razor Pages.

With ASP.NET Core 2 we get another way of building web applications. It’s one of those new things that is actually forgotten old thing and it is called Razor Pages. Are we going back to WebMatrix days? This blog post is short introduction to Razor Pages in ASP.NET Core 2.

Micro ORM-s are useful small ORM-s that are lightweight and map between objects and database queries. This blog post discusses when to use Micro ORM-s and provides example code where Micro ORM called Dapper is used.

In couple of ASP.NET projects I have had a CSS path transform problems with bundling and minification. CSS-files are coming in from external agencies and from different open-source projects and the number of files is so big that it is problematic to go through all of these after updates. I found solution path transform solution that works for me in most cases and it is described here.

I started playing with Microsoft Cognitive Services and discovered that it makes many otherwise complex tasks very easy. This blog post shows how to build web application that detects faces on uploaded photo.

ASP.NET Core applications can be tested with different testing frameworks and Entity Framework Core makes testing specially easy by removing different technical problems from our way by using in-memory data provider. This blog posts shows how to unit test controllers that use data from Entity Framework Core.

ASP.NET Core has memory based caching similar to what we had in previous ASP.NET versions. This blog post shows how to use memory cache alone and with support for distributed cache in ASP.NET Core web applications.

ASP.NET Core supports also distributed cache solutions. Out-of-box there is support for SQL Server and Redis based distributed caches. This blog post focuses to SQL Server based cache we can use when there are really no better options.

For some ASP.NET Core projects errors related to bower and bundling may appear after project is moved to csproj file from previous project.json format. This blog post introduces how I got these errors solved for imported project.