Thoughts on .Net & Coding

As a C# developer building ASP.NET web applications you create classes and then use their objects in your application. In JavaScript, however, there are multiple ways to create objects. This article gives you a quick overview of these available options with an example of each.

Some time ago I wrote a three part article on creating and consuming Web API in ASP.NET Core. You can read them here - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. If you worked with that example you must have noticed that while serializing data to the client, the ASP.NET Core Web API uses camel casing.

In an article I wrote some time ago, I explained the essentials of in-memory caching in ASP.NET Core. Although in-memory caching serves its purpose in many small applications, at times you need distributed cache rather than local in-memory cache. Consider a situation where a web farm is serving the requests. In this case you can't guarantee that the server storing the cache will serve all the requests. You may also want your cache to survive application restarts.

The primary purpose of any caching mechanism is to improve performance of an application. As an ASP.NET developer you are probably aware that ASP.NET web forms as well as ASP.NET MVC could used Cache object to cache application data. This was often called server side data caching and was available as an inbuilt feature of the framework. Although ASP.NET Core doesn't have Cache object as such, you can implement in-memory caching quite easily. This article shows you how.

As an ASP.NET developer you always used web.config to store and retrieve the application's configuration information. ASP.NET Core uses a different configuration system that is more flexible and powerful than before. In this article you will learn the basics of storing and retrieving the configuration information from JSON and XML files. You will also learn to use DI to inject this information into controllers.

As you are aware of C# 7.0 and Visual Studio 2017 have been released. In this article I quickly take you through seven new features of the language that are worth knowing. I assume that you are familiar with C# 6.0 and hence I am not going into too much technical details of these features here. My aim is to quickly let you know of a few interesting features that can make your C# code more efficient and clear. Let's get going.

By default the installation of Visual Studio 2017 is taken care by a web installer. That means you download only the required components over the web. Although this works quite well in many cases, at times you may want to install Visual Studio 2017 in offline manner. Some of the possibilities include unstable internet connection and installation on large number of machines of your organization. As of this writing there is no ISO image of the product that one can download. Luckily, there is a command line way to grab all the installation components that you need for an offline installation. So, let's see how to grab them in four easy steps.

As an ASP.NET developer you are probably aware that IIS comes with its own compression module that can effectively compress the response content. This can dramatically reduce the network bytes giving good performance benefits. However, what if you aren't using IIS at all? Luckily, ASP.NET Core offers you a middleware that can compress the response content for you. In this article you will learn to configure the ASP.NET Core response compression middleware in your web application.