Tips for the Week in .NET

WeekIn.NET.20160112.md

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.NET

• Debugging and Profiling in Visual Studio 2015 by Manuel Meyer
• Tony Sneed recounts his journey to open source in How open source changed my life.

ASP.NET

• Goodbye child actions, hello view components by Dave Paquette
• Real time translated chat with ASP.NET, Microsoft Translator and IP Messaging by Devin Rader

Json.NET 8.0 - http://james.newtonking.com/archive/2015/12/20/json-net-8-0-release-1-allocations-and-bug-fixes

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34611919/how-to-package-a-portable-net-library-targeting-net-core

That plus the linked related qustions document my knowledge on how to implement some common NuGet packaging scenarios in the modern way.

Colorful.Console. Adds some colour to the console. I contributed string to ASCII Art code to the project recently. It's a very cool project.

Serilog is a contender for the best logging framework available on .NET at the moment.

Last month I built Serilog.Exceptions to help log exceptions in more detail. Most logging frameworks simply call Exception.ToString() which does not include information from the Data property of an exception and any custom properties.

Here is an example of what you get when you log the notorious DbEntityValidationException from Entity Framework, the information in the EntityValidationErrors property is normally missing when doing Exception.ToString() but is shown when using Serilog.Exceptions:

{
  "Timestamp": "2015-12-07T12:26:24.0557671+00:00",
  "Level": "Error",
  "MessageTemplate": "Hello World",
  "RenderedMessage": "Hello World",
  "Exception": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationException: Message",
  "Properties": {
    "ExceptionDetail": {
      "EntityValidationErrors": [
        {
          "Entry": null,
          "ValidationErrors": [
            {
              "PropertyName": "PropertyName",
              "ErrorMessage": "PropertyName is Required.",
              "Type": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbValidationError"
            }
          ],
          "IsValid": false,
          "Type": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationResult"
        }
      ],
      "Message": "Validation failed for one or more entities. See 'EntityValidationErrors' property for more details.",
      "Data": {},
      "InnerException": null,
      "TargetSite": null,
      "StackTrace": null,
      "HelpLink": null,
      "Source": null,
      "HResult": -2146232032,
      "Type": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationException"
    },
    "Source": "418169ff-e65f-456e-8b0d-42a0973c3577"
  }
}

https://github.com/ignatandrei/Exporter - an Open Source framework to export a List or JSON/CSV data to Excel/Word/PDF

NuGet package at https://www.nuget.org/packages/ExporterWordExcelPDF/

Demo at http://exporter.azurewebsites.net/

ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate is a set of advanced ASP.NET MVC 5 & 6 project templates for building secure, fast, robust and adaptable web applications or sites. It provides the minimum amount of code required on top of the default MVC template provided by Microsoft which is very basic. It's available on the Visual Studio Gallery.

The ASP.NET 5 MVC 6 template provides a feature selection wizard which lets you pick from a huge list of options. It makes creating a new project and enabling fully secure HTTPS with advanced security features like strict transport security, content security policy, public key pinning, HTTPS only cookies and anti-forgery tokens a one click process:

VerbalExpressions is a very cool project to make regular expressions human readable:

 [TestMethod]
public void TestingIfWeHaveAValidURL()
{
        // Create an example of how to test for correctly formed URLs
        var verbEx = new VerbalExpressions()
                .StartOfLine()
                .Then( "http" )
                .Maybe( "s" )
                .Then( "://" )
                .Maybe( "www." )
                .AnythingBut( " " )
                .EndOfLine();

        // Create an example URL
        var testMe = "https://www.google.com";
        Assert.IsTrue(verbEx.Test( testMe ), "The URL is incorrect");
        Console.WriteLine("We have a correct URL "); }