Visual Studio

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.

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.

Yesterday Microsoft announced .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) – the effort to turn Xamarin Forms apps use single cross-platform code-base targeting multiple platforms. Demos from Build conference yesterday gave clear signal – it’s not just an experiment but real deal. They really had single project running on Windows desktop and iPhone. This blog post is short overview of what’s coming.

Entity Framework Core 5.0 comes with SQL-based brother to ToString() method for LINQ-queries. This method is called ToQueryString() and it returns provider-specific SQL without connecting to database server. This blog post shows how ToQueryString() method works.

Visual Studio database projects have been one of my important tools since Visual Studio 2010. Database projects were not easy to use with build servers ten years ago. Today things are different. It’s super easy to use database projects to update staging and live databases from Azure build and release pipelines. This blog post shows how to do it.

Surface Neo and Surface Duo are new devices by Microsoft, planned to launch for holidays season this year. Surface Neo runs Windows and Surface Duo is based on Android. For Surface Duo there’s already preview tooling and SDK available by Microsoft. Here’s the introduction to Surface Duo development, tools and patterns.

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.

I thought first my ASP.NET Core edition of Hello, Blinky will be my last Hello, Blinky for long time. But then something reminded me of Blazor and I thought why not build Blazor edition of Hello, Blinky for Windows IoT Core and Raspberry Pi? After some hacking I made it work. Here’s my Hello, Blinky for Blazor.

ASP.NET Core 3.0 applications doesn’t build views automatically by default when changes are made. Views are built when application compiles and this is expected final state for views. It’s still possible to make ASP.NET Core application build views when changes are made. Most popular case is when application is running on Visual Studio and we are working on cosmetics of view.

With Visual Studio 2019 we can publish ASP.NET Core 3.0 applications as self-contained executable. It’s specially useful for environments where ASP.NET Core 3.0 is not installed or where we don’t have permissions to install it. Here’s how to do it.