Tagged articles - ASP.NET Core

It is obvious that no matter what is the size and complexity of your application, configuration values on your local development machine and the environment where the application is going to run will be different. To avoid any hard-coding and recompilation of your code, the most common practice is to store application and environment specific values to configuration files. Although ASP.NET Core provides great out of the box solution for having multiple configuration files depending on the environment (Use multiple environments in ASP.NET Core), there are still things that should not reside in the configuration files. ...read more

SignalR is number one choice for real-time communication between server and client. It implements several transports for communication between server and client...read more

Working with file system operations like creating or deleting files and directories if quite often part of applications flow. Both .NET and .NET Core come with great out of the box classes and methods to achieve this. These classes and methods are part of System.IO name space, but unfortunately both .NET and .NET Core implementations are the same and they use static classes and method to manipulate files and directories on the host file system. ...read more

Whether you are doing micro-services or mid-size monolith applications that do not have to be too distributed, there is a big chance that you will depend on some external HTTP service. Whether it is REST, SOAP or any other type of the response, your application flow depends on it's response. Sure using queues and event-based communication between services or components will definitely increase the resilience of the application and make more error-proof, it adds additional complexity to the whole solution and sometimes that can be an overhead depending on the application type or the infrastructure you might be limited with. ...read more

Unit testing is an important part for maintaining code quality and what is the most important thing, avoiding bugs in production. This is one of the reasons why unit tests and high code coverage is desired as a part of the project and as a part of the build process since you can detect potential bugs and issues during the build process when unit tests are executed...read more

Patterns, conventions and standards are invented and enforced in order to make coding easier and more understandable for the developers, but in some cases certain patterns and conventions do not couple so easily and you have to rely on more on the actual technology you are using in order to overcome these complications. One of the cases this happens is using CQRS, especially commands and REST. Although commands give clear separation of intention of some action, at the same time commands are especially tough to handle in soma cases because of their immutability...read more

Swagger is the most convenient way to document your REST api endpoints. It provides generating of documentation on the fly based on the code structure, which shortens the time of creating the documentation drastically...read more

Recently I wrote an article about Automatic CQRS handler registration in ASP.NET Core with reflection in order to reduce number of lines for registering command and query to IOC container in ASP.NET Core. However, this solution does reduce lines for service registration in the startup, you still need to add all command and query handlers as parameters to the controller constructor. ...read more

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern is one of my favorite way of handling the Web API requests for a simple reason that is clearly separates reading and writing. Quite often at some stage of the project you will hit the performance bottlenecks which are most probably cause by the way you are reading ow writing your data. CQRS splits reading and writing so that you can independently use different persistence framework for reading and writing...read more

Since REST services do not have the UI, there is not much space for the localization. Data is sent and retrieved and most of the decisions is made based on the status code of the response...read more

Swagger is a great way to document you REST API endpoints and reduce the need for communication, item spent and the cost for supporting the consumers of you APIs. Apart from providing the info about the endpoints, models, validation it can also display the data of the product...read more

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

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