Advanced Web Development with Visual Studio 2017/2019

Part 1: .NET Core

.NET Core

.NET Core is the new kid on the block. So why would I want to use .NET Core?

• What and Why
• Understanding .NET Core: .NET Framework versus .NET Core
• Supporting multiple runtimes

Visual Studio improvements for ASP.NET Core

With .NET Core Microsoft introduced a new project model, with a lot of emphasis on NuGet packages.

• Understanding the new project structure
• Compile directly to memory
• Installing dependencies with NuGet
• Targeting frameworks and handling differences
• Executing commands and tools
• Handling bundling and minification in .NET Core projects

.NET Core Cross-Platform Capabilities

So how can I build .NET core applications on a Mac or Linux machine?

• Developing ASP.NET Core on any platform
• Generating a .NET Core project using dotnet cli
• Getting started with Visual Studio Code

ASP.NET Core Pipeline

ASP.NET Core easily outperforms all other web hosting solutions. So how did they do that? Here we will look at the ASP.NET pipeline, and how to make it do your bidding.

• Understanding the principle of the ASP.NET Core Pipeline
• Selecting your middleware in the Startup class
• Understanding the need for dependency injection and how to configure it
• Adding your first middleware for serving static files
• ASP.NET Core has its own routing middleware
• Showing proper diagnostics while developing, and not in production

The new ASP.NET Core Configuration

ASP.NET Core allows you to pick and choose where to store your configuration. We will look at the idea behind this and of course how to choose your configuration.

• No more web.config
• Formats: JSON, INI or XML
• Why you should store confidential configuration in environment variables and user secrets
• Different ways of getting configuration to your code
• Using the Options pattern
• Adding your own configuration provider

Logging

Proper logging is essential to find problems in production. .NET Core brings a unified logging approach which you can use anywhere in .NET and also works with your preferred logging framework.

• Why do we need another logging framework
• Choosing from different logging providers
• Understanding logging scopes
• An example: Using NLog
• Logging guidelines and recommendations

OWIN and Middleware

The Open Web Interface for .NET brought a simple standard way for building web servers with .NET. ASP.NET Core built upon this standard and with it you can easily build your own custom extensions for .NET Core.

• What is the OWIN specification
• Project Katana and how to build a webserver with it
• Building your own custom middleware
• Testing your middleware

ASP.NET Core and MVC

Every new version of MVC brings a couple of improvements making it easier for developers to build state-of-the-art web applications. Among other features we will look at taghelpers, which bring a similar concept like Angular directives to the server side.

• Web UI and Web API Unification
• MVC routing changes
• Understanding _ViewStart.cshtml and _ViewImports.cshtml
• Better readable and more powerfull Razor with tag helpers
• Developing and installing your own tag helpers
• Building View Components
• Service Injection

Entity Framework Core

With .NET Core also comes Entity Framework Core. A new implementation of EF, which can run cross-platform, on Windows, Mac and Linux. You will get a look at the differences between EF Core and EF 6.

• Difference with Entity Framework 6
• Scaffolding your project from an existing database
• Generated code
• Interacting with the database

Modeling your database with EF Core

Mapping in EF Core uses conventions, or Fluent API. You will see how to use Fluent API in EF Core.

• Methods of configuration
• Creating and applying migrations
• Table and column mapping
• Modeling properties
• Value generated properties
• Using Owned Entities and Value objects
• Concurrent updates
• Modeling relationships

SignalR

Add real-time web functionality to your application.

• What is SignalR?
• Server Concepts
• Building SignalR Clients with C# and JavaScript

Blazor

Blazor is a new way to build interactive client-side web UI with ASP.NET Core.

• Introducing Blazor
• Client-Side vs. Server-Side Blazor
• Creating a simple Blazor Component
• Hosting Blazor
• How does it work?

Part 2: Azure

Azure App Services: Web Apps

So you want to host your web site. But what about scalability, fault-tolerance, HTTPS and other things? The cloud can make this a lot easier for you.

• Using the Web Site Gallery
• Deploying from Visual Studio
• Free, shared, basic and standard plans
• Scaling options
• Configuring app settings, TLS, domain names and backup scheduling
• Monitoring your Web Api

Logging and monitoring your applications with Application Insights

In this module, you will learn about Applications Insights which allows you to detect and diagnose exceptions and application performance issues in the cloud. You will learn how to implement Applications Insights into your website to monitor your backend and frontend behaviour.

• Enabling Application Insights
• Diagnosing Failures
• Diagnosing Dependencies
• Custom events and using Metrics Explorer
• Availability and Performance
• Using Alerts to detect live problems early
• Snapshot debugging
• Power BI dashboards

Part 3: Authentication and Authorization with OpenID Connect

Understanding Claims-Based Security

So what will you allow your user to do? This most-likely depends on the role the user has in your organisation. This role is now represented with claims. In this chapter you will get a better understanding why claims are better than roles, and how claims are transmitted in a secure way.

• Representing the user
• Introducing claims based security
• Understanding tokens and their representation on the net
• Using Claims in .NET

Modern web authentication and authorization

In the modern web we all want to share stuff. But how do you safely allow one web site to access resources from another web site? OAuth2 is the current standard way in which you can implement this. Authentication is hard, so better left to the experts. With OpenID Connect you can delegate authentication to an identity provider (such as Facebook, Azure AD, Identity Server and others).

• The Internet and a way of sharing
• Introducing OAuth
• OpenID Connect: Adding sign-in to OAuth
• OAuth fundamentals: Authorization Code Grant, Implicit Grant and Client Credential Grant
• Implementing OpenID Connect web sign-in

Protecting a Web-API with OAuth

Modern web sites and mobile appls consume REST services. You can use OAuth with OpenID Connect to authenticate users, after which you can use claims to authorize resources stored in a web API.

• Protecting a Web API's resources
• Adding permissions to the server side
• Requesting permissions at the client side
• Using the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)
• ADAL Session management
• User consent

Part 4: Tweaking your web site

Error Handling

Proper error handling is NOT easy. Especially these days with Search Engine Optimization and services handling errors becomes more complex.

• Handling errors at different levels in ASP.NET
• HandleErrorAttribute
• Handling on the level of the hosting platform
• Properly returning a 404 and 500 page
• Http Status Codes best practices

Internationalization

The world is a big place, with many spoken languages. If you want to reach the world, you should build multi-language support in from the beginning.

• Display Content in Different Cultures
• Using resource files
• Different Views
• Validation Messages
• Autodetect Cultures
• Override Cultures
• Client-side Localization

Performance Tips

So how do you make if go faster? Paint a stripe on it?

• Working with Async methods
• Limiting network bandwidth with bundling and minification
• Using Content Delivery Networks
• Always run release in production
• Various performance tweaks