NetLearner – ASP .NET Core Internet Learning Helper

By Shahed C on November 11, 2018
8 Replies

This is the sixth of a new series of posts on ASP .NET Core. This week, we’ll be looking  at NetLearner, a new ASP.NET Core Web app to organize online learning resources.

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NetLearner: What is it?

NetLearner is an ASP .NET Core web app to allow any user to consolidate multiple learning resources all under one umbrella.

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Some Background: As I’ve been doing a lot of R&D on ASP .NET Core, I found myself keeping track of blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, Twitch streams, Pluralsight tutorials, ebooks across Amazon, Safari Books Online, and so much more. I’ve been using Notepad, OneNote, browser bookmarks, Twitter lists, emails to myself, Google/Word docs and so much more just to keep track of URLs, notes and progress. I’m building this new app for myself to organize my learning plans, but also open-sourcing it and deploying it to allow others to use it too.

Web NetLearner on GitHub: https://github.com/shahedc/NetLearner

The name implies 2 things: the app’s source code will be a real-world example for people learning .NET (specifically ASP .NET Core 2.1 and beyond), and the tool itself will help people learn any topic from various resources across the Internet.

What can you expect in 2019?

  1. Use the web app’s source code to learn all about ASP .NET Core 2.1+ and beyond.
  2. Add links to various learning resources: books, articles, blogs, conference sessions, podcasts, online workshops, videos and livestreams.
  3. View embedded content where appropriate, e.g. videos
  4. See contents of RSS feed where appropriate, e.g. blogs with RSS
  5. Discover what others have added to their NetLearner lists, via suggestions of what’s popular.
  6. Follow content creators with links to their social media accounts.
  7. Deploy your own instance instantly to your own Azure account.
  8. Build lists to learn anything and share with others.

Stay tuned for more information!

Your Web App Secrets in ASP .NET Core

By Shahed C on November 4, 2018
17 Replies

This is the fifth of a new series of posts on ASP .NET Core. This week, we’ll be looking  at app secrets for ASP .NET Core projects, for use in development environments.

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Protecting Application Secrets During Development

Most web apps need to store some configuration information that can be accessed by the application during runtime. This may include database connection strings and API keys, which are not user-specific confidential values, but are still sensitive pieces of information that need to be protected.

Once in a while, a developer may accidentally commit such sensitive information to public repositories such as Github. Quoting this blog post from the Azure website, “Keep in mind that removing a published secret does not address the risk of exposure. The secret may have been compromised, with or without your knowledge and is still exposed in Git History. For these reasons, the secret must be rotated and/or revoked immediately to avoid security risks.”

This blog post intends to prevent you from ever making that mistake in the first place. You may download the following sample project to follow along.

Web AppSecretDemo: https://github.com/shahedc/AppSecretDemo

Continue reading →

Protocols in ASP .NET Core: HTTPS and HTTP/2

By Shahed C on October 28, 2018
6 Replies

This is the fourth of a new series of posts on ASP .NET Core. This week, we’ll be looking at the use of HTTPS in ASP .NET Core projects (using HTTP/1.1 today) and also HTTP/2 support for future ASP .NET Core projects.

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HTTPS and SSL

If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably familiar with HTTPS and the little lock symbol that appears on websites that have a valid SSL certificate. It’s actually TLS these days, and you can read more about SSL, TLS and HTTPS here:

Recently, the popular Google Chrome browser received an update that automatically displays a “Not Secure” message for any website that doesn’t use SSL. To address this, I updated this blog site to ensure that all embedded content use HTTPS when the site is loaded with HTTPS. I took it one step further and always enabled SSL so that site visitors going to WakeUpAndCode.com (with just HTTP) will be redirected to https://WakeUpAndCode.com.

This site is a WordPress site, so I was able to make the last change by installing a free plugin called Really Simple SSL.

If you’re not convinced you need SSL, just read this thread on Twitter:

EDIT: If you need another nudge in the right direction, here’s a gentle reminder from Troy Hunt, a well-known influential computer security expert in the Microsoft world. Troy highlights an anti-HTTPS debate that illustrates why it doesn’t make sense to be against it.

HTTPS in ASP .NET Core

For years, it has been too easy for ASP .NET developers to build Web Apps and Web APIs without any HTTPS during development. It wasn’t uncommon for web application developers to make excuses about not running their web apps with SSL on their local development environments, even if the application needed to be deployed to production with SSL (which production app doesn’t?).

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Pages in ASP .NET Core: Razor, Blazor and MVC Views

By Shahed C on October 21, 2018
6 Replies

This is the third of a new series of posts on ASP .NET Core. This week, we’ll be looking at various types of Pages you may encounter in an ASP .NET Core web app:

  1. Razor Pages (new as of v2.0)
  2. the experimental Blazor (C# in the browser!)
  3. the more familiar MVC Views (aka Razor Views)

If you already know how to create each type of project, feel free to jump past section 3B below.

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Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure you download an IDE or code editor to open and run the code samples. My recommendations are below:

A. Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com

B. Visual Studio 2017 (v15.8 or later): https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/

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To get the latest SDK, download .NET Core v2.1 or higher:

Web .NET Core Download: https://www.microsoft.com/net/download

To use Blazor in Visual Studio 2017, you must install the ASP .NET Core Blazor Language Services extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace:

Web Blazor extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=aspnet.blazor

The instructions below will cover both Command Line Interface (CLI) commands and IDE/editor steps to create, build and run the code samples.

Web Sample code: https://github.com/shahedc/PagesDemo

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Azure Blob Storage from ASP .NET Core File Upload

By Shahed C on October 13, 2018
10 Replies

This is the second of a new series of posts on ASP .NET Core. In the past week, I had the opportunity to participate in a hackfest with several colleagues from across the globe, to work on real-life customer projects. I took a break from my primary project to help a colleague with a simple problem: upload a file from a web browser and save it into Azure Blob Storage within an ASP .NET Core web application!

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Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure you sign in to Azure, create a storage account and make a note of the storage connection information.

Refer to:

“Show me the code!”

Fortunately, I packaged everything nicely as a simple web app project, uploaded into Github and added instructions on how you can use it right away.

Web Get it here: https://github.com/shahedc/SimpleUpload

I tested it in Visual Studio 2017 v15.8.6 and Visual Studio Code, so either should work for you.

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Continue reading →