Thoughts on .Net & Coding

Developers often need to authenticate Web API calls at two levels. You might want to authenticate individual users while making an API call or you might want to authenticate the client that is trying to call an API. The former is can be implemented via a token based scheme and latter can be implemented using what is known an API key authentication.

Recently Microsoft released .NET 8 that also included a good amount of enhancements to ASP.NET Core. As a part of the improvements Blazor got a new project template -- Blazor Web App. The new project template supports the newly added features including render modes and authentication. In this article we will look at the new project template and template options in Visual Studio 2022.

ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs allow you to quickly create controller-less HTTP APIs with minimal dependencies. A minimal API typically has an endpoint URL and an endpoint handler. At times you want to intercept an endpoint handler so that you can add pre and post processing to the endpoint handler. That's where Endpoint Filters come into picture. When there are too many endpoints, it makes sense to group them using a common URL prefix. This is taken care by Route Groups. In this article we will examine both with a few examples.

ASP.NET Core web developers often need to test the controller based APIs and minimal APIs they add in their projects. Typically developers use tools such as Postman or Swagger for this purpose. Visual Studio 2022 now has tools that can come handy for quickly testing your APIs. This article explains these tools with an example.

In the previous article we learned to use sessionStorage and localStorage in Blazor apps. The localStorage object also has storage event that one can use to get notified when localStorage is modified in some way. In this article we will first discuss the storage event with an example. We will then learn to use what is known as Protected Browser Storage that is available exclusively to Blazor Server apps.

Traditionally developers used cookies to store small pieces of information on the client machine. Although you can use cookies in Blazor apps, there is a modern and more handy alternative -- sessionStorage and localStorage objects.

In the previous article we learned to cascading create dropdown lists in ASP.NET Core MVC. You might want the same functionality in Blazor Web Assembly apps also. That's what we are going to do in this article.

Many years ago I wrote a few articles on displaying cascading dropdown lists in ASP.NET. Since this is a very common requirement while building web UIs it's worthwhile to see how cascading dropdown lists can be displayed in ASP.NET Core MVC also.