Abhishek Shukla

Introduction to the new ASP.NET 5 framework with Visual Studio 2015

February 25, 2016 by Abhishek Shukla·0 Comments

In this blog post we are going to talk about the basics and new features in ASP.NET 5 and Visual Studio 2015 by creating our favourite Hello World Program.

Visual Studio 2015 is a File based project system now which means that when we add a file in the file system then it is automatically picked up and a dynamic compilation happens that could result in faster refresh and faster build behind the scenes. This is possible because of the Rosyln compiler https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn.
In the newer version of Visual studio we can develop applications with the full featured .Net framework as well as the Cloud Optimized Core CLR. The idea of designing this new Core CLR is to make the application with fast startup, low memory usage and high throughput (I wonder why this is not the default framework always). Core CLR is designed to work on the environments other than windows as well like Linux and OSX. Core CLR is available as a nuget package and hence could be deployed as part of the application itself but keep in mind, this being an optimized CLR might be missing types available in the full features .NET framework.

The newer version of ASP.NET has taken steps towards unification by combining ASP.NET MVC + WebAPI into one class itself which means that it would have only one base controller for both.

MVC6 WebPage MVC WebAPI

MVC 6 does not rely on the System.Web anymore and also the minimum size of the HttpContext is reduced to 2kb from 30kb. Let’s create our favourite project HelloWorld in ASP.NET 5

New ASP.NET 5 Project

Make sure you select the Web Application under ASP.NET 5 Templates. and Uncheck the Host in Cloud checkbox for now.

Hello World ASP.NET 5 Project

Now let’s navigate to the Controllers folder of the project in the File Explorer and create a new file named HellowWorldController.cs

New Controller

You would notice that this file is automatically refreshed in the solution

File Explorer Sync

Now let’s add some code to this controller to see it in action.

using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc;

namespace HelloASPNET5.Controllers
{
   public class HelloWorldController : Controller
   {
       public string Index()
       {
           return "Hello World! Have we achieved World Peace Yet?";
       }
   }
}

Build and run the project by pressing Ctrl + F5 and change the url to call the controller that we just created.

Run ASP.NET 5

This was certainly less painful as we do not have to remember what files we created in the file system (Not that I do, Git takes care of all that) as Visual Studio automatically takes care of that.

Now if we change the controller and save the file and then refresh the browser, my changes are reflected which was not the case before while working with C# files.

Run ASP.NET 5 After File Save

The root of the website is not longer the root of the project. By default the root of the website is wwwroot folder which contain all the static resources of the Website (including the bin folder for dlls) by default. We can add more static resources here as well. This allows a clear separation between the files that need to deployed to webserver and the configuration files.

WebRoot wwwroot

By default the views also reference resources from the webroot (~) of the website.

Reference Webroot wwwroot

We could change it by modifying the webroot in the project.json file.We will also notice the new way of declaring dependencies.

Change Webroot wwwroot

However the dependencies that could be added in project.json has be 100% .NET dependencies. We could include these dependencies using the good old Manage Nuget Packages option.

Manage Nuget Packages

or we could hand type the dependencies in the project.json files itself and intellisense would help us out there. We could specify the version we want to target or add empty string (“”) to use the latest always.

Add nuget reference manually

Once we do that and save the project.json file we would see that the References section in the solution explorer will show the progress of getting and mapping the package that we just added. And at last building the project.

Auto Build

If you look further down in the project.json file you would see in the framework section that both full featured dotnet and dotnet core frameworks have been included. This will make visual studio build the solution against both the framework which could be beneficial when we are supporting multiple frameworks.

Target Multiple Frameworks

When we run the project in the local system it would run against only one of the framework so to check which framework we are running against we could go to the project properties we could select the framework.

Select One Framework

When we are working in the solution on anything like say in the HelloWorldController I want to return the current date and time using timezone then we could see the information of availability in intellisence.

Package Availability

We could use the # defined symbols to write code against specific frameworks. Like we could use #dnx451 for dotnet framework and #dnxcore50 for core framework.

namespace HelloASPNET5.Controllers
{
   public class HelloWorldController : Controller
   {
       public string Index()
       {
#if dnx451
           return "Hello World its " + System.TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(System.DateTime.Now).ToString() + "here.";
#endif
           return "I don't know whet time it is.";
       }
   }
}

Use # directive

Now if you see the in the current solution of the project you would not find the packages that are listed as dependencies. The reason is because they are present under the user profile folder in .dnx folder.

Framework Location

When you go inside the .dnx folder you would see the packages folder where all the packages referenced by the current project and all the other projects will be present so that all of them could be reusable.

Packages Location

You would also see a runtimes folder where we could see the available runtimes which are x64 and x86 versions of both full dotnet framework and core framework.

Runtime Location

Any questions, comments and feedback are always welcome.

Selenium Automation to verify if an email address is valid or not

January 26, 2016 by Abhishek Shukla·0 Comments

Hey guys,

Today I am going to share a program that I wrote sometime back when I was learning to work with Selenium. I had a lot of people commenting and subscribing on my blog and I wanted to figure out if those emails were valid or not so I found out a bunch of websites that could do that for you but I did not want to go through the exercise of copy pasting and verifying one email at a time. So I wrote a selenium program to do that for me.

The website did have a bulk purchase program but the minimum that one could purchase was 3000 emails and I needed to verify like a 100 hence automation to the rescue.

To write a program similar to this you would need to know C# and little bit of html/css and working knowledge of selenium

I just tried this program recently and found out that it needed a fix. So I have fixed the program and its available on my GitHub page. This would give you a basic infrastructure and knowledge to write a selenium automation. This program is only educational purposes. I request you to not to use it for any other reason.

Here are a few screenshots from the program

Start Screen

Select Emails To Verify

See App In Action

Feel Free to provide your feedback, comments and suggestions

$5 Skill Up Year in Review 2015 | Packt Publications (Limited Time only)

January 2, 2016 by Abhishek Shukla·0 Comments

Good News

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You could buy my book Blend for Visual Studio 2012 by Example: Beginner’s Guide for just $5 for a limited time only.

Blend for Visual Studio

So what are you waiting for buy now and get skill upgrade.

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Benchmark your REST API – The easy way

October 12, 2015 by Abhishek Shukla·2 Comments

I recently came across a great tool for benchmarking your APIs. It’s a nodejs tool written by Matteo Figus. Complete documentation on the tool could be found here

In this post I will provide simple tutorial for anyone to use this tool for their API’s

Create a folder and run navigate to the folder using your tool of choice for running node commands. I use Git Bash. Run the following command to install the api-benchmark package. This would require node to be installed beforehand.

$ npm install api-benchmark

Now let’s add a new JavaScript file and name it as mybenchmark.js. We will require the benchmark tool

var apiBenchmark = require('api-benchmark');

In this example we will use the Giphy API. Giphy is a GIF search engine. So let’s define a few variables that we will use.

var service = {
  server1: "http://api.giphy.com/"
};
var apiKey = 'dc6zaTOxFJmzC'; // public beta key

Let’s add the routes which we want to test. In this example we will get the trending gifs.

var routes = {
		trending: {
			method: 'get',
			route: 'v1/gifs/trending?api_key=' + apiKey,
			headers: {
				'Accept': 'application/json'
			}
		}};

And finally we run the benchmark

apiBenchmark.measure(service, routes, function(err, results){
	console.log(results);
});

Here is the complete code of mybechmark.js for your convinence

var apiBenchmark = require('api-benchmark');

var service = {
  server1: "http://api.giphy.com/"
};
var apiKey = 'dc6zaTOxFJmzC'; // public beta key

var routes = {
		trending: {
			method: 'get',
			route: 'v1/gifs/trending?api_key=' + apiKey,
			headers: {
				'Accept': 'application/json'
			}
		}};

apiBenchmark.measure(service, routes, function(err, results){
	console.log(results);
});

To see this in action we will run the benchmark by running the following command in your console.

$ node mybenchmark.js

And you should see something like below.

Api-Benchmark 1

This does show that our benchmark ran but we cannot interpret the results from here. To see that we will have to use the getHtml method available on api-benchmark.

apiBenchmark.measure(service, routes, function(err, results){
  apiBenchmark.getHtml(results, function(error, html){
    console.log(html);
  });
});

However this will dump the entire html on the console which is nearly impossible to understand.

API Benchmark 2

We will now save this html to a file so that we can view the results like the way it was intended. Let’s require another package to help us do that

var fs = require('fs');

Change the apiBenchmark.measure to save the html in a file

apiBenchmark.measure(service, routes, function(err, results){
  apiBenchmark.getHtml(results, function(error, html){
    fs.writeFileSync('benchmarks.html', html);
  });
});

To see this in action we will run the benchmark by running the following command in your console.

$ node mybenchmark.js

This would create a new html file (benchmarks.html) in your current folder with the results. It would look something like below. You see the details of your requests and your api is performing.

API Benchmark Stats

It also has 2 more tabs which show Request Details and Response Details as well. All of this provides great insight into your APIs.

API Benchmark Request Response

However I felt that if we could get the distribution of the api calls then it would provide deeper insight into my APIs. So I added a new tab to the report to showcase the distribtion of api calls overtime. The pull request is merged. So you would notice additional tab in the report i.e. distribution tab and you should see something like below

API Benchmark Distribution

We could also specify the available options to benchmark the API’s deeply. Let’s try out a few

apiBenchmark.measure(service, routes, {
			debug: false,
			runMode: 'parallel',
			maxConcurrentRequests: 10,
			delay: 0,
			maxTime: 100000,
			minSamples: 100,
			stopOnError: false
		}, function(err, results){
	apiBenchmark.getHtml(results, function(error, html){
		fs.writeFileSync('benchmarks.html', html);
	});
});

API Benchmark Stats 100

API Benchmark Distribution 100

Hope this helps you in getting started with api-benchmark. The entire source code for this post can be downloaded at googledrive or onedrive

Any questions, comments or feedback is always welcome.

First Ever book on Blend for Visual Studio is now available

August 5, 2015 by Abhishek Shukla·0 Comments

The first ever book on Blend for Visual Studio is now available for purchase. The book is called Blend for Visual Studio 2012 by Example: Beginner’s Guide and is available for purchase form Packt Website – https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/blend-visual-studio-2012-example-beginners-guide

Blend for Visual Studio