The Monsters Weekly - Episode 31 - Migrating to Bootstrap 4

The process for referencing and updating client side packages has changed in ASP.NET Core. Instead of using Nuget for packages like jQuery and Bootstrap, the default project template uses the Bower package manager.

Join Monster Dave as he walks us through using Bower to update to the latest alpha bits Bootstrap 4. We'll cover the Visual Studio tooling and the new Tag Helpers related to referencing JS and CSS files. 

Related Links:

http://bower.io/

http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2015/08/19/bootstrap-4-alpha/

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 30 - dotnet on OSX

In episode 30 we attempt to get dotnet running on OSX by following the directions on the website. Things don't go quite as well as hoped and Simon ends up trying to read the C++ source code for dotnet to figure out why things aren't working. 

Turns out that dotnet is not supported on OS X 10.9 https://github.com/aspnet/PlatformAbstractions/issues/23 We'll update and try this again later. 

Links

http://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/#/macosx

Horrible looking C++ which is probably the problem

Thanks to Andy or @Inumedia who gave out sage advice on the dotnet/cli Gitter channel. 

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 29 - Working with Developer Pages

When things go sideways in application development, it's certainly helpful to have more than just the dreaded yellow screen of death.  ASP.NET Core has really augmented the developer experience via some interesting extensibility points that you can leverage from the default template.

Join Monster Dave as he walks us through the different developer pages that ship with the default template. We'll also talk a little about the kinds of ways you could use this approach in your projects with custom middleware of your own.

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 28 - Integrated Payments with Stripe in ASP.NET Core MVC

Yes! You can accept payments in your ASP.NET Core applications. Third party payment processing systems have really come of age and made it not only simple for you to start collecting payments, but also help to keep your users' personal information - such as credit cards - private...and more importantly off your server.

In this episode, Monster James shows us how to create a system for accepting user information, creating subscriptions using the Stripe.net NuGet package and integrating all of that into our application. We'll use the Stripe.js library to negotiate a token representing the user's credit card data and never have to submit the sensitive bits to our server.

This episode will also make use of some other features we've previously covered:

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 27 - Windows Docker Containers

Some monsters like rice pudding, some monsters like to do automotive repair but these monsters like containers. Containers of what? To day containers of Windows. In this episode we show off a simple right click deploy of our project to a Windows container running on Windows 2016 on Azure. That's right, it is 2016, and we don't need no stinking Linux our ASP.NET apps in containers!

If you're interested in learning more about Windows Containers then check out 

GitHub Authentication with ASP.NET Core

Authentication has changed over the years, and my take on it has surely shifted. No longer is it the scary, intimidating beastie that must be overcome on our projects. Today, we can let external providers provide the authentication mechanisms, giving the user with a streamlined experience that can give them access to our application with previuosly defined credentials.

GitHub Authentication in ASP.NET Core

Let’s have a look at what it takes to allow users to authenticate in our application using GitHub as the login source, and you can check out the Monsters video take of this on Channel 9.

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 26 - GitHub Authentication in ASP.NET Core

When your primary market is fellow developers, having GitHub authentication is a great way to allow your users to engage with your site without requiring them to sign up on yours, while still providing a means to create and manage user-specific data in your application.

In this episode, Monster James walks us through the process of getting GitHub authentication working in an ASP.NET Core application using the OAuth authentication provider. 

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 25 - Dependency Injection into Filters

Action filters can be used to annotate action methods in ASP.net - that's not new. But in ASP.NET Core the filters can participate much more fully in the dependency injection story. You no longer need to jump though container specific hoops or make use of a service locator pattern. As an added bonus in this episode James throws Simon under the bus and makes him write GenFu code on the fly.  

Read all about filters in the official documentation at https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/mvc/controllers/filters.html

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 24 - View Components in ASP.NET MVC Core

If you need a way to bundle up bits of UI and related behind-the-scenes logic, chances are you're looking for View Components in ASP.NET MVC. This feature of the MVC Framework lets you build reusable components in a new way that better participates in the HTTP request and controller lifecycle.

In previous versions of the MVC Framework, we had child actions, but those have gone the way of the dodo. In this video, Monster Dave walks us through leveraging View Components - including a brief cross over into dependency injection - in our Razor views.

The Monsters Weekly - Episode 23 - 'Working With Sensitive Data - User Secrets'

If you’re working on a project where you’ll be sharing code with someone else, particularly if you’re keeping the source code in a public repository, you’re going to want to make sure that sensitive data is separate from your project. This includes things like API keys, tokens for services and perhaps passwords or other similar data.