Filtered by Tag (net)

Moving to ASP.NET Core RC2: Tooling
.NET Core Runtime RC2 has been released a few days ago along with .NET Core SDK Preview 1. At the same time of .NET Core release, ASP.NET Core RC2 has also been released. While I am migrating my projects to RC2, I wanted to write about how I am getting each stage done. In this post, I will show you the tooling aspect of the changes.
@ 05-22-2016
by Tugberk Ugurlu
.NET Core ASP.NET Core

.NET Core Runtime RC2 has been released a few days ago along with .NET Core SDK Preview 1. At the same time of .NET Core release, ASP.NET Core RC2 has also been released. Today, I started doing the transition from RC1 to RC2 and I wanted to write about how I am getting each stage done. Hopefully, it will be somewhat useful to you as well. In this post, I want to talk about the tooling aspect of the transition.

Get the dotnet CLI Ready

One of the biggest shift from RC1 and RC2 is the tooling. Before, we had DNVM, DNX and DNU as command line tools. All of them are now gone (RIP). Instead, we have one command line tool: dotnet CLI. First, I installed dotnet CLI on my Ubuntu 14.04 VM by running the following script as explained here:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://apt-mo.trafficmanager.net/repos/dotnet/ trusty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dotnetdev.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver apt-mo.trafficmanager.net --recv-keys 417A0893
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dotnet-dev-1.0.0-preview1-002702

This installed dotnet-dev-1.0.0-preview1-002702 package on my machine and I am off to go:

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You can also use apt-cache to see all available versions:

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Just to make things clear, I deleted ~/.dnx folder entirely to get rid of all RC1 garbage.

Get Visual Studio Code Ready

At this stage, I had the C# extension installed on my VS Code instance on my Ubuntu VM which was only working for DNX based projects. So, I opened up VS Code and updated my C# extension to latest version (which is 1.0.11). After the upgrade, I opened up a project which was on RC1 and VS Code started downloading .NET Core Debugger.

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That was a good experience, I didn't dig into how to do that but I am not sure at this point why it didn't come inside the extension itself. There is probably a reason for that but not my priority to dig into right now :)

Try out the Setup

Now, I am ready to blast off with .NET Core. I used dotnet CLI to create a sample project by typing "dotnet new --type=console" and opened up project folder with VS Code. As soon as VS Code is launched, it asked me to set the stage.

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Which got me a few new files under .vscode folder.

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I jumped into the debug pane, selected the correct option and hit the play button after putting a breakpoint inside the Program.cs file.

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Boom! I am in business.

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Now, I am moving to code changes which will involve more hair pulling I suppose.

Resources

Microsoft Build 2016 in a Nutshell
Two weeks ago, I had an amazing opportunity to be at Microsoft Build Conference in San Francisco and I would like to share my experience about the conference with you in this post by highlighting what has happened and giving you my personal takeaways.
@ 04-09-2016
by Tugberk Ugurlu
.NET Core ASP.NET 5 ASP.NET Core Cognitive Services IoT Machine Learning Microsoft Azure

Two weeks ago, I had an amazing opportunity to be at Microsoft Build Conference in San Francisco as an attendee thanks to my amazing company Redgate. The experience was truly unique and amount of people I have met there was huge. A bit late but I would like to share my experience about the conference with you in this post by highlighting what has happened and giving you my personal takeaways. You can also check out my tweets for the Build conference.

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Announcements

There were bunch of big and small announcements throughout the conference from Microsoft. Some of these were highlighted during two keynotes and some other announcements were spread to three days. I tried to capture all of them here but it's very likely I missed some of them (mostly the small ones):

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Sessions

2016-03-31 15.28.14

Here is the list of sessions I have attended:

As much as I wanted to attend some other sessions, I missed some of them mostly due to clashes with other sessions. Luckily recordings for all Build 2016 sessions are available up on Channel 9. Here is my list of sessions to catch up:

There were also many good Channel 9 Live interviews. You can find them here. Here is a personal list of a few which are worth listening to:

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Personal Takeaways

All in all it has been a great conference and as stated, I am still catching up on the stuff that I have missed. Throughout the conference, I have picked up a few key points and I want to end the post with those:

  • I have seen more from Microsoft to make developers lives easier and more productive by enabling new tools (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows), supporting multiple platforms (Service Fabric to run on every environment including AWS, on-premises, Azure Stack and preview of Service Fabric on Linux), open sourcing more (some parts of Xamarin have gone open source) and making existing paid tools available for free (Xamarin is now free).
  • Microsoft is more focused on getting their existing services together and trying to give a cohesive ecosystem for developers. Service Fabric, Cognitive Services, Data Lake is a few examples of this.
  • .NET Core and CoreCLR is approaching to finalization for v1. After RC2, I don't suppose there will be much more features added or concepts changing.
  • I think this is the first time I have seen stabilization on client Apps story for Microsoft. Universal Windows Platform (UWP) was the focus on this area this year and it was the same on previous year.
  • I am absolutely happy to see Microsoft abandoning Windows Phone day by day. There was no direct sessions on it during the conference.
  • There were more steps towards making software to manage people's lives in a better way. Skype Bot Framework was one of these steps.
  • Microsoft (mostly Azure group) invests on IoT solutions heavily. Azure Functions and new updates on Azure IoT Suite are just a few signs of this.
  • Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and ARM templates are getting a lot of love from Microsoft and it's the way they push forward. They even build new services on Azure on top of this.

Having a Look at dotnet CLI Tool and .NET Native Compilation in Linux
dotnet CLI tool can be used for building .NET Core apps and for building libraries through your development flow (compiling, NuGet package management, running, testing, etc.) on various operating systems. Today, I will be looking at this tool in Linux, specifically its native compilation feature.
@ 01-03-2016
by Tugberk Ugurlu
ASP.NET 5 Linux

I have been following ASP.NET 5 development from the very start and it has been an amazing experience so far. This new platform has seen so many changes both on libraries and concepts throughout but the biggest of all is about to come. The new command line tools that ASP.NET 5 brought to us like dnx and dnu will vanish soon. However, this doesn’t mean that we won’t have a command line first experience. Concepts of these tools will be carried over by a new command line tool: dotnet CLI.

Note that dotnet CLI is not even a beta yet. It’s very natural that some of the stuff that I show below may change or even be removed. So, be cautious.

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Scott Hanselman gave an amazing introduction to this tool in his blog post. As indicated in that post, new dotnet CLI tool will give a very similar experience to us compared to other platforms like Go, Ruby, Python. This is very important because, again, this will remove another entry barrier for the newcomers.

You can think of this new CLI tool as combination of following three in terms of concepts:

  • csc.exe
  • msbuild.exe
  • nuget.exe

Of course, this is an understatement but it will help you get a grasp of what that tools can do. One other important aspect of the tool is to be able to bootstrap your code and execute it. Here is how:

In order to install dotnet CLI tool into my Ubuntu machine, I just followed the steps on the Getting Started guide for Ubuntu.

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Step one is to create a project structure. My project has two files under "hello-dotnet" folder. Program.cs:

using System;

namespace ConsoleApplication
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

project.json:

{
    "version": "1.0.0-*",
    "compilationOptions": {
        "emitEntryPoint": true
    },

    "dependencies": {
        "Microsoft.NETCore.Runtime": "1.0.1-beta-*",
        "System.IO": "4.0.11-beta-*",
        "System.Console": "4.0.0-beta-*",
        "System.Runtime": "4.0.21-beta-*"
    },

    "frameworks": {
        "dnxcore50": { }
    }
}

These are the bare essentials that I need to get something outputted to my console window. One important piece here is the emitEntryPoint bit inside the project.json file which indicates that the module will have an entry point which is the static Main method by default.

The second step here is to restore the defined dependencies. This can be done through the "dotnet restore" command:

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Finally, we can now execute the code that we have written and see that we can actually output some text to console. At the same path, just run "dotnet run" command to do that:

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Very straight forward experience! Let’s just try to compile the code through "dotnet compile" command:

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Notice the "hello-dotnet" file there. You can think of this file as dnx which can just run your app. It’s basically the bootstrapper just for your application.

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So, we understand that we can just run this thing:

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Very nice! However, that’s not all! This is still a .NET application which requires a few things to be in place to be executed. What we can also do here is to compile native, standalone executables (just like you can do with Go).

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Do you see the "--native" switch? That will allow you to compile the native executable binary which will be specific to the acrhitecture that you are compiling on (in my case, it’s Ubuntu 14.04):

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"hello-dotnet" file here can be executed same as the previous one but this time, it’s all machine code and everything is embedded (yes, even the .NET runtime). So, it’s very usual that you will see a significant increase in the size:

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This is a promising start and amazing to see that we have a unified tool to rule them all (famous last words). The name of the tool is also great, it makes it straight forward to understand based on your experiences with other platforms and seeing this type of command line first architecture adopted outside of ASP.NET is also great and will bring consistency throughout the ecosystem. I will be watching this space as I am sure there will be more to come :)

Resources

Integration Testing with MongoDB with MongoDB.Testing Library
I have put together a library, MongoDB.Testing, which makes it easy to stand up a MongoDB server, create a random database and clean up the resources afterwards. Here is how you can start using it.
@ 12-05-2015
by Tugberk Ugurlu
MongoDB

Considering the applications we produce today (small, targeted, "micro" applications), I value integration tests way more than unit tests (along with acceptance tests). They provide much more realistic testing on your application with the only downside of being hard to pinpoint which part of your code is the problem when you have failures. I have been writing integration tests for the .NET based HTTP applications which use MongoDB as the data storage system on same parts and I pulled out a helper into library which makes it easy to stand up a MongoDB server, create a random database and clean up the resources afterwards. The library is called MongoDB.Testing and it’s on NuGet, GitHub. Usage is also pretty simple and there is also a a few samples I have put together.

Install the library into your testing project through NuGet:

Install-Package MongoDB.Testing -pre

Write a mongod.exe locator:

public class MongodExeLocator : IMongoExeLocator
{
    public string Locate()
    {
        return @"C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\3.0\bin\mongod.exe";
    }
}

Finally, integrate this into your tests:

[Test]
public async Task HasEnoughRating_Should_Throw_When_The_User_Is_Not_Found()
{
    using (MongoTestServer server = MongoTestServer.Start(27017, new MongodExeLocator()))
    {
        // ARRANGE
        var collection = server.Database.GetCollection<UserEntity>("users");
        var service = new MyCounterService(collection);
        await collection.InsertOneAsync(new UserEntity
        {
            Id = ObjectId.GenerateNewId().ToString(),
            Name = "foo",
            Rating = 23
        });

        // ACT, ASSERT
        Assert.Throws<InvalidOperationException>(
            () => service.HasEnoughRating(ObjectId.GenerateNewId().ToString()));
    }
}

That’s basically all. MongoTestServer.Start will do the following for you:

  • Start a mongod instance and expose it through the specified port.
  • Creates a randomly named MongoDB database on the started instance and exposes it through the MongoTestServer instance returned from MongoTestServer.Start method.
  • Cleans up the resources, kills the mongod.exe instance when the MongoTestServer instance is disposed.

If you are doing a similar sort of testing with MongoDB, give this a shot. I want to improve this based on the needs. So, make sure to file issues and send some lovely pull requests.

My Talk on Profiling .NET Server Applications from Umbraco UK Festival 2015
I was at Umbraco UK Festival 2015 in London a few weeks ago to give a talk on Profiling .NET Server Applications and the session is now available to watch.
@ 11-11-2015
by Tugberk Ugurlu
ASP.NET 5 Elasticsearch Geek Talks

I was at Umbraco UK Festival 2015 in London a few weeks ago to give a talk on Profiling .NET Server Applications. It was a really great experience for me as this was my first time presenting on this topic which I love and enjoy very much. Also, the conference venue was a church which made it really interesting for a presentation and I would be lying if I tell you that I didn’t feel like a deacon up there on the stage :) The fantastic news is that all sessions were recorded and all of them are available to watch now including my Profiling .NET Server Applications talk:

You can find the slides under my Speaker Deck account and I also encourage you to download the free e-book which gives you 52 quick tips and tricks for .NET application performance:

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Finally, here are some further resources to look at if the talk was interesting for you:

Hi 🙋🏻‍♂️ I'm Tugberk Ugurlu.
Coder 👨🏻‍💻, Speaker 🗣, Author 📚, Microsoft MVP 🕸, Blogger 💻, Software Engineering at Deliveroo 🍕🍜🌯, F1 fan 🏎🚀, Loves travelling 🛫🛬
Lives in Cambridge, UK 🏡
Tugberk Ugurlu, ASP.NET MVP
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