.NET

Authentication is an essential component of pretty much any REST API. Most of the resources you expose through REST API services, unless they are protected inside intranet, need to be protected by some kind of authentication. This is pretty much clear and it is easy achieved by just simply decorating your controller actions or even whole controllers with Authorize or AllowAnonymous attributes. ...read more

Contracts, models or DTOs, call them how ever you want, are your connection with the outside world from your REST API. Consumers of your API depend on them and they know what to expect or what your API endpoints expect in communication...read more

Implementing partial updates on the REST API is probably the trickiest method to implement. Unlike PUT HTTP method where you pass the whole DTO when you are updating an entity, PATCH method is intended to update only one or few properties of the entity you want to apply change to...read more

It is not uncommon that for records in database you need to store image files or other documents related to the specific record on the file system. Storing documents related to the database records on the file system is not a silver bullet...read more

Pretty much all models of digital cameras including smartphones have ability and usually by default store additional metadata along with the image itself taken. This data is stored in EXIF format and you can easily see it if you are a Windows user by checking the properties of the photography file. ...read more

Reflection allows accessing type structure and its meta-data in runtime. Using reflection, you can dynamically instantiate objects, access fields, methods and properties regardless of the protection level...read more

Serverless model is becoming more and more popular everyday and all major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GoogleCloud are providing their own implementation of serverless cloud computing model. As more and more companies are shifting their infrastructure to cloud, serverless model becomes more and more popular mostly because it's cost effectiveness, easy setup and out of the box scaling and orchestration...read more

There is a big buzz about AI these days and major Cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud are competing to bring better products to their platforms for variety of AI tasks. One of these services is speech recognition and generating transcription text from the audio. I recently worked on a project which involved transcribing large amount of daily generated audio recordings...read more

Over the time various techniques to manipulate database data have evolved in .NET. Entity Framework is certainly the most advanced one, but for small ad hock applications where you have few inserts to deal with, ADO is still the fastest way to write data to the database...read more

Paging a REST API response is equally important as filtering the data returned through REST API endpoints and they quite often come together. Just like filtering, paging limits the amount of data returned from the endpoint, saving both client and server side resources...read more

Apart from running on Windows and Linux both x86 and x64 architecture, .NET Core is an ideal platform for IOT (Internet of things) projects because it can also run on ARM32 and ARM64. This means you can run it pretty much any device with both RISC or CISC processor architecture. If you are .NET developer or you are familiar with .NET platform and C# language, this means you can now write applications that run on Raspberry Pi which is based on RISC architecture by writing them in Visual Studio...read more

Starting from .NET Core version 2.1, there are so far three types of WebApi responses that controller actions can return. All three types had it's own pros and cons but all are lacking in options to satisfy both REST and the high level of testability. The available response types in ASP.NET Core including recently released 2.2 version are ...read more

Starting from it's initial release ASP .NET Core comes with built in dependency injection (DI) to help implement Inversion Of Control design pattern. This is not something new in .NET and apart from built-in DI in .NET Core, there are other libraries which provide same and in some cases even more advanced dependency injection implementation...read more

When running ASP.NET Core application as self-hosted using Kestrel, it will by default use port 5000 for listening for requests. This should not be a big issue since you can always proxy requests to port 5000. Problem occurs when you might want to have multiple applications on one host, or you simply cannot use port 5000 for security or any other reasons.Luckily, default port for ASP.NET Core application running on Kestrel can be easily changed, but in order to make it easily configurable there are few changes you need to make in your code in order to access IHostingEnvironment and IConfiguration implementation instances combined. ...read more

Model validation is an important part of request life-cycle and pipeline in MVC Core regardless whether you are building Web API project or ASP.NET MVC web application. Both project templates rely on the common ASP.NET Core platform therefore validation is pretty much the same in both type of projects. Because Web API and micro services are more popular nowadays, I am going to use Web API sample project to demonstrate how to modify validation response in MVC Web API Core project. ...read more