Thoughts on .Net & Coding

Now a days many ASP.NET developers use TypeScript for their client side code. So, it's worth to add TypeScript in your web development skill-set. If you are a beginner new to TypeScript this multipart series consisting of articles and videos is just for you. In this series I am going to introduce you with the fundamentals of TypeScript language and how to integrate it in your ASP.NET Core apps. I am going to assume that you use Visual Studio 2019 as the IDE for your web development and you are familiar with the basics of JavaScript programming.

If you are keeping an eye on the progress and future direction of .NET you might be aware that somewhere in May 2019 Microsoft announced that the next major release after .NET Core 3.0 will be .NET 5. And just a few days ago they announced the availability of .NET 5 Preview 1. The remainder of this article discusses the current state of .NET Framework and .NET Core and where the things are heading to for web developers.

ASP.NET Core Blazor allows you to develop client side web applications using HTML, Razpr, and C#. A typical Blazor application consists of one or more Razor components. A Razor component physically exists as .razor file and contains a mix of HTML markup, Razor constructs, and C# code. A Razor component can either be used as if it is a page or it can be housed inside other component. If you are beginner in Blazor it's worthwhile to learn some fundaments of building Blazor components. That's what this article is about.

As an ASP.NET Core developer you are familiar with server side routing. If you ever worked with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular you might be familiar with their client side routing capabilities. You are probably aware that many frameworks and libraries offer a client side "router" that enables client side routing capabilities for your JavaScript code. For real-world professional web apps it makes sense to pick some robust and feature rich client side routing mechanism. But for simple purposes and for learning how client side routing works, it would be good to write some code that implements such a capabilities. To that end this article illustrates how a simple client side router can be built using JavaScript.

As an ASP.NET Core web developer you are probably quite comfortable working with Microsoft SQL Server and Entity Framework Core. However, at times you need to work with other popular data stores. One such popular database engine is MySQL. To that end this article illustrates how to connect with a MySQL database and perform CRUD operations using MySQL Entity Framework Core provider.

While working with Entity Framework Core and ASP.NET Core you typically create EF Core model consisting of a custom DbContext and entity classes. If your database already exists, it can be mapped with the EF Core model. However, if the database doesn't exist already, you would want it to be created. Of course, you can create the database manually by looking at the EF Core model and creating tables accordingly. Wouldn't it be nice if the database gets created automatically for you based on the EF Core model your created? To that end this article discusses just that.

While developing ASP.NET Core web applications you often need to transfer data residing in one object into another. You can accomplish this task manually by setting properties of the target object with the values from the source object. But wouldn't it be nice if this task can be automated? That's what the AutoMapper library is about. In this article you learn to use AutoMapper in an ASP.NET Core application.

At time your ASP.NET Core web applications want to display certain data in the form of bar chart or pie chart. Although there are plenty third-party components and libraries that you can use to accomplish this task, Google Charts is a simple yet feature rich client side option. To that end this article shows how Google Charts can be used to render simple bar charts and pie charts.