dontnetConf 2015 Videos

In the last couple of days Microsoft hosted dotnetConf, an online 2 day conference. The first day was, as expected, very focused on .NET Core and ASP.NET 5. Despite a bit repetitive, the intro talks were very nice for someone that is now getting started with ASP.NET 5. Other than those, I’d highlight:

• ASP.NET 5: Deep Dive – The best talk on the first day. Covers the tooling, the differences on targeting different CLR versions and different hosts. It also describes the pipeline approach on ASP.NET 5 and how it compares to the previous versions.  There also a nice recent post on MSDN Magazine.
• .NET Core Deep Dive – Not much of a deep dive there. But it ends up being a nice talk about Microsoft’s experience of developing .NET Core in open source and with community contributions.
• .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”): Analyzers and the Rise of Code-Aware Libraries – The goodies of the new compiler platform. It has been around for a while but it is now being used “for real”. Also a must see.

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Hello ASP.NET 5 World – Part III

In the previous post I improved the hello world example to include the static files middleware. In this post I’ll wrap up this series by adding MVC. The first thing is to add the corresponding package. This can be done on the command line:

kpm install Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc 6.0.0-beta3

As the static file middleware, MCV includes a convenience extension method to add itself to the pipeline. We can use that method when configuring the application:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
    app.UseStaticFiles();
    app.UseMvc();
}

In addition, since dependency injection is now used throughout the framework, we need to register the services required by MVC on the DI container. I’m not yet familiar with the details of the DI model on ASP.NET 5, but there’s another method (besides Configure) that the framework invokes by convention when starting up an application:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddMvc();
}

Note the usage of AddMvc, an extension method also included in MVC to register its services on the container.

MVC 6 Includes the features that were previously found on both MVC and Web API. Everything should be familiar, having in mind that the base HTTP programming model is a bit different. That said, adding a controller is straightforward. Just add a class whose name has the Controller suffix, define an action and its route and your good to go. You don’t need to extend the base Controller class, even though it has many useful methods and properties (View(), Redirect(), Request, Response).

public class HelloWorldController
{
    [Route("Hello")]
    public object Index()
    {
        return new
        {
            Message = "Hello ASP.NET 5 world!",
            Time = DateTime.Now.ToString(),
        };
    }
}

If we run the app from the console an navigate to http://localhost:5000/hello we’ll get a JSON response returned by the controller. The same controller can also have an action returning an IActionResult which corresponds to a view:

[Route("Hello/Goodbye")]
public IActionResult Goodbye()
{
    return View();
}

And that’s it for now!

Hello ASP.NET 5 World – Part II

On my previous post I ended up with a simple Hello World web application. The application configuration simply registered a callback to handle all the requests and write something to the response. I’d like to revisit this in more detail.

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
    app.Run(ctx => ctx.Response.WriteAsync("Hello ASP.NET 5 world! Time: " + DateTime.Now));
}

Let’s start by IApplicationBuilder. This interface – which was IAppBuilder on Katana – is a means of registering components (middlewares) that participate on request processing. You do so by invoking its Use method:

IApplicationBuilder Use(Func<RequestDelegate, RequestDelegate> middleware);

The method’s signature can be a bit confusing at first. In order to understand it, lets look into RequestDelegate:

public delegate Task RequestDelegate(HttpContext context);

This delegate represents the handling of a request. It’s a function that gets a context and returns a Task that completes when the request has been processed; it corresponds to OWIN’s AppFunc. Did you notice HttpContext? This isn’t System.Web’s infamous class; it’s a new one with the same name and similar function, resulting from Katana’s IOwinContext.

Back to the Use method, we can say that it gets a function that maps one request handler to another. In other words, whatever function that is, it is a means of composing around an existing request handler. This is similar to DelegatingHandlers on ASP.NET Web API and has some similarities with System.Web’s IHttpModule. It’s worth pointing that the Run method on the example above is just an extension method that invokes Use with a constant RequestDelegate. So, let’s do a simple middleware:

public class GotchaMiddleware
{
    public RequestDelegate Process(RequestDelegate next)
    {
        return async httpContext =>
        {
            await next(httpContext);
            await httpContext.Response.WriteAsync("  GOTCHA!");
        };
    }
}

And register it on the pipeline:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
    app.Use(new GotchaMiddleware().Process);
    app.Run(ctx => ctx.Response.WriteAsync("Hello ASP.NET 5 world! Time: " + DateTime.Now));
}

Note how the middleware has a method that matches the Use method signature. Running the application from the command line again, we get:

Hello ASP.NET 5 world! Time: 07/03/2015 00:26:01  GOTCHA!

ASP.NET includes different middlewares, such as one for serving static files. MVC 6 itself is plugged in as a middleware. Typically, each middleware defines an extension method for IApplicationBuilder to register itself on the pipeline. For instance, we can register the static file handler by adding a dependency on the corresponding NuGet package to the project.json file:

{
    "dependencies": {
        "Microsoft.AspNet.StaticFiles" : "1.0.0-beta3",
        ...
    },
    ...
}

And invoking the UseStaticFiles extensions method:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
    app.UseStaticFiles();
    // ...
}

Note the pay-for-play philosophy: we needed to serve static files, so we added a new package.

On the following post I’ll end this Hello World set by adding a simple MVC controller.