The Problem

What they neglect to say is all that testability and persistence ignorance flies right out the window when you create a new ASP.NET Web Application using the MVC template and "Individual User Accounts" authentication. What you get is a single-layered application, tightly coupled to Entity Framework, that:

• Ignores the patterns that facilitate testing, including: the repository pattern, unit of work pattern, and dependency injection;

• Forces you to implement their IUser interface in your application’s User entity, thereby coupling it to ASP.NET Identity;

• Eliminates any clear separation between your entities, persistence concerns, and business logic. Persistence ignorance? Forget about it.

Thankfully, due to the extensibility designed into ASP.NET Identity, it is possible to ditch the reference to the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework assembly and write a custom implementation that can address these and other architectural issues. Just be forewarned: it is not a trivial undertaking, and you’ll have to put up with some code smell that is baked into the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Core assembly. 

Here’s the list of what’s new in this preview:

• New Razor features: @attribute, @code, @key, @namespace, markup in @functions
• Blazor directive attributes
• Authentication & authorization support for Blazor apps
• Static assets in Razor class libraries
• Json.NET no longer referenced in project templates
• Certificate and Kerberos Authentication
• SignalR Auto-reconnect
• Managed gRPC Client
• gRPC Client Factory
• gRPC Interceptors 

My last post investigated ways to build a .NET Core desktop/console app with a web-rendered UI without bringing in the full weight of Electron. This seems to have interested a lot of people, so I decided to upgrade it to newer technologies and add cross-platform support.

The result is a little NuGet package called WebWindow that you can add to any .NET Core console app. It can open a native OS window (Windows/Mac/Linux) containing web-based UI, without your app having to bundle either Node or Chromium. 

In this post I described the problem that by default, DataAnnotation validation doesn't recursively inspect all properties in an object for DataAnnotation attributes. There are several solutions to this problem, but in this post I used the MiniValidation library from Damian Edwards. This simple library provides a convenience wrapper around DataAnnotation validation, as well as providing features like recursive validation. Finally I showed how you can replace the built-in DataAnnotation validation with a MiniValidation-based validator

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddOptions<MySettings>()
    .BindConfiguration("MySettings")
    .ValidateMiniValidation() // 👈 Replace with mini validation
    .ValidateOnStart();

var app = builder.Build();

OptionsValidationException: 
  DataAnnotation validation failed for 'MySettings' member: 'Nested.Value' with errors: 'The Value field is required.'.; 
  DataAnnotation validation failed for 'MySettings' member: 'Nested.Count' with errors: 'The field Count must be between 1 and 100.'.
Microsoft.Extensions.Options.OptionsFactory<TOptions>.Create(string name)
Microsoft.Extensions.Options.OptionsMonitor<TOptions>+<>c__DisplayClass10_0.<Get>b__0()

In simple terms, before we write a line of code, we start each sprint planning session by outlining a blog post describing what our next release will be.

Developed by Microsoft’s Research in Software Engineering, Code Contracts provide a way to convey code assumptions in your .NET applications. They can take the form of preconditions, postconditions, and state invariants. In C# Code Contracts Succinctly, author Dirk Strauss demonstrates how to use Code Contracts to validate logical correctness in code, how they can be integrated with abstract classes and interfaces, and even how they can be used to make writing documentation less painful.

It has only been about a year since .NET Core 1.0 RC came out. We are now getting close to .NET Core 2.0. We have been playing with .NET Core since the betas and feel like the quality of the 1.0 runtime was very good. Our only complaint has really been odd Visual Studio behavior. We would expect that with 2.0, the adoption of .NET Core is likely to skyrocket.