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.

Coming to cloud with web application can be scary if it’s the first time you do it. Azure cloud is not anymore about dozen of services – it’s real monster offering more than we are able to know and learn. It’s not easy to predict what will be the final path on cloud but it is possible to tell how to get started. Here’s my advice to you.

Writing integration tests for ASP.NET Core controller actions used for file uploads is not a rare need. It is fully supported by ASP.NET Core integration tests system. This post shows how to write integration tests for single and multiple file uploads.

After making ASP.NET Core code coverage reports work on local box I made step further and made code coverage reports available also on Azure DevOps. This blog post shows how to generate code coverage reports for .NET and ASP.NET Core applications on Azure DevOps.

I needed automatic version numbering based on current date when web application is built. It was wish by some customers and in their projects it’s okay with it. As their code is covered with automated tests and other diagnostics I’m using Azure DevOps as build server and this is where I made automated date based versioning work.

Error when running ASP.NET MVC application from Visual Studio: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS. Stop inventing painful hacks, solution is here.

About year ago I wrote a blog post Running PHP applications on .NET Core where I introduced how to build PHP applications to .NET Core using Peachpie. Their showcase was WordPress – the famous blog engine that also runs my blog. Peachpie guys have made significant work over year and they have reached the point where whole WordPress is built as .NET Core application.

Azure has new and interesting service for hosting static sites on blob storage. There is no additional server-side application hosting account needed to run public static sites – they run straight from blob storage. Although the service is in public preview, it is time to find out how it works and when we should consider using it.

My previous post about Raspberry Pi traffic lights introduced simple traffic lights simulator. I developed the solution further and came out with more advanced version that has better architecture, more flexible design and support for traffic lights schedules that are automatically downloaded from remote server.

Most of beginner examples for Raspberry Pi introduce how to turn on and off LED lamp. I wrote a little bit more complex starting example but it has some touch from real life – my example simulates traffic lights. I’m IoT noobie but using Microsoft tools it was actually easy to build this little example. This blog post is short introduction about what I did.

Next version of ASP.NET Core is getting better and better and with it we can use new tooling for Blazor applications announced yesterday at official ASP.NET blog. Blazor is Microsoft tooling to build WebAssembly applications using .NET languages. This blog post is short introduction to Blazor tooling and WebAssembly.

Sharing code and working together on it in real time from different locations has been issue for years. We have video chat and screen sharing for long time but working on same files together in IDE has been a dream. Visual Studio Live Share is here to solve the problem. Although the service is not generally available yet it is possible to try out early versions of it using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.This blog post gives straightforward overview of Visual Studio Live Share specially for developers.