Tagged articles - dotnet core

EF Core has migrations as a way of restoring the database structure inherited from Entity Framework and for the most of the cases all you have to do to setup your database structure changes when deploying your new application version is to call the Migrate method from your DbContext.Database property. It is not a perfect solution but as I mention, it works great for majority of the cases and takes of the complexity of sorting out order for execution of pending changes so you can focus on business logic of your application. ...read more

Implementation approach for soft delete is more-less straight forward thing. Instead of deleting data record, you introduce a flag which will mark the record as deleted and you can simply filter out on it and not show the data with the flag set. This way you do not loose data, but you restrict the end user to see it. This way of "deleting" data records, or better said marking them as deleted applies for certain types of applications, but sometime this requirement may come later as a new feature while the actual delete is in place...read more

In 2019 I worked on a REST API service which accepts files and stores them. Back then in .NET Core 2.2 I wrote custom Swagger operation filter which I described in article Handling file uploads in Swagger UI with ASP.NET Core...read more

Swagger is a great way do describe your RESTful API. In ASP.NET it is pretty easy to wire up your OpenAPI documentation with your service facade with Swashbuckle NuGet package...read more

As much as it is important for testing the functionality of the application, data seeding can also be used to pre-load some values like lookups not only to development and test environment but also to populate these values in production as well. Seeding of data can be done in several ways and in this article I will go through two ways of seeding data. Both of them have their pros and cons and it is up to you to pick the way you want to have your data pre-seeded in your application database. ...read more

Having your REST API versioned is important for evolving of the service over time. Especially if your service is exposed t multiple 3rd party clients...read more

.NET Core has done a great job by introducing interface for most of classes which makes them easy to write unit tests around them. However, there are a lot of classes that re commonly used which are not refactored in .NET Core...read more

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

While designing the REST API, quite often you may find yourself in a situation where the data can be provided from multiple sources, like route, query string or POST/PUT payload. While that might not be a big problem, it may force you to redesign your models and most likely you will end up with keeping your original DTOs but then designing a new model in your application services layer just to have all your data from different sources in one place when you are passing it to the service method. Resolving multiple sources custom binding ...read more

Configuration is probably the most essential part of every application, yet we do not give much attention to it during application design and development. .NET Core has quite nice way to store configurations (usually JSON files) and already built-in extensions to access configuration values and directly cast them to a specific type...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

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

Some time ago I wrote an article about Reloading the cache automatically once expired is ASP.NET MVC. The piece of code represented in that article is build on top of .NET Framework 4.7.2...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

Apart from adding your own middleware to the ASP.NET MVC Core application pipeline, you can control the response using custom MVC filter attributes and selectively apply them to either whole controller or controller actions. One of the commonly used MVC filter in ASP.NET Core is ExceptionFilterAttribute for handling error response in Wep API applications. It is easy to implement and I also wrote an article about Error handling in ASP.NET Core Web API few months ago...read more