Monthly Archives: March 2017

Quick Start EF Core Videos on Channel 9

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My Pluralsight course, Entity Framework Core: Getting Started, is a pretty thorough exploration for learning about EF Core. But at 5 hours, it may not be the VERY first thing you want to look at. So I’ve created some 12 minute videos on Channel 9 that will, in that very short time, walk you through building some tiny apps that use EF Core so you can get your hands dirty. While you won’t learn much in the way of ins & outs, they will walk you through:

  • creating a new app from scratch,
  • adding in a domain class
  • add in EF Core
  • creating an EF Core data model
  • creating a database from the model
  • creating and saving some data
  • reading, updating and modifying some data.

That’s a lot for 12 minutes, but I have done it in a way that you can just watch and learn, or follow along to build the apps yourself . For some of the code that is not related to the EF Core lesson, you can even copy that code from my GitHub account and paste it into your solution.

There are currently 2 videos.

EF Core in a Full .NET Application Using Visual Studio 2015
This one is designed to assure you that you can use EF Core in a full .NET application and using totally familiar tools. You’ll build a little .NET console app that uses EF Core to read and write some movie data.

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EF Core in an ASP.NET Core Application Using Visual Studio 2017
This video will give you the full leading edge .NET Core experience as you use the brand new Visual Studio 2017 to create a tiny ASP.NET Core MVC App that uses EF Core to interact with the data. Again, some of the code that is not about EF Core is available to copy/paste from my GitHub account, making it easy to follow along with the demo.EFCoreQS2Lerman_512

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I’ll be adding anther one showing  Creating an ASP.NET Core App with EF Core Using Visual Studio Code in OS X . You can keep an eye on my Channel 9 Niners page or this blog to see what that gets published.

When your ready to really learn about EF Core, head over to Pluralsight for my Entity Framework Core: Getting Started Course. If you don’t have a subscription, contact me for a 30-day free trial code.

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Cloning a GitHub Repo in Visual Studio 2017 …and a Quiz

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When showing off some VS2017 features at our VTdotNET meetup, I made a last minute decision to demo the ability to clone a repository right from GitHub. Then I thought I would combine that with other things I planned to demo.

I already had just the right repo sitting in my GitHub account. A small ASP.NET Core project that was built with Visual Studio 2015 using project.json for its metadata. It’s at https://github.com/julielerman/NetCoreSolutionToMigrateToVS2017.

I had this same solution on my laptop already to use for another demo: showing off VS2017’s ability to auto-migrate a project.json based solution to the new csproj based format for .NET Core projects.

Clever me, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Clone the repo and have the migration run as it was opening that solution.

So I started up Visual Studio 2017 (since I wanted to show how fast that is) and began the process of cloning the solution from my GitHub repo. I already had my credentials set up and was able to go to File, Open and Open from Source Control.

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This opens the Team Explorer window and I clicked the Clone option, which then opened a window showing all of the accounts I’m connected to.

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I expanded my own account and scrolled down to the repo I wanted, selected it and clicked the Clone button.

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The solution got cloned and then it opened up in Visual Studio.

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But it never triggered the migration! And if you look at the solution, you can see that the project I expanded still has its xproj file and its project.json file. At the time I was confused but now that I know what happened, the answer to why this didn’t migrate is very visible in that screenshot of the Solution Explorer. However, one of the developers who was watching this and had just done another demo with Visual Studio 2017, identified the problem quickly.

Let’s move on for some more clues.

I closed the solution. Then from File/Open, I browsed to the place where it had been saved on my computer, and selected the sln file to open. This time, the same exact solution opening up in VS2017, did indeed trigger the migration, which is quite obvious thanks to this screen.

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Then I let the migrate feature do its job. When it was finished, you can see that the project no longer has its xproj and project.json files.

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Now, look at this new Solution Explorer screenshot compared to the previous one.

And then take a look at the list of new VS2017 features in the Release Notes (https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes) under the section IDE and see if you can tell what the cloning did differently when opening the solution than just opening the solution directly from the drive.

Also, I will find out if this is by design or possible a behavior that can get modified to behave the way I had expected. 🙂

DotNet Core Version Confusion

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I see people scratching their heads over this a lot so am dropping it here even though I’m sure it’s stated in many places already.

When you are at the dotnet command line (aka the CLI aka Command Line Interface) and type ‘dotnet’ you will be shown the version of the runtime.

When you add the version parameter (‘dotnet –version’) that will return the version of the SDK (aka CLI aka Command Line Interface) that you are working with.

Here’s an example:

If you are confused, you’re not alone. There’s a good discussion/debate on GitHub about how to alleviate this confusion at  What should dotnet –version display?

 

Changes to EF Core With the RTM of VS2017 and Tools

Data Access, ,

When Visual Studio 2017 released today a few other things happened that are relevant to Entity Framework Core.

For more on EF Core, watch my EF Core: Getting Started course on Pluralsight.

EF Core Migrations Tools Release

First – something we were prepared for – the .NET Core SDK was also released. The last stable version was 1.0.0-preview2-1-003137. It’s now simply 1.0.0. Along with this, its dependent tooling, including EF Core Tools for PowerShell and dotnet were also released. As the .NET Core support evolved from project.json to msbuild, the EF Core tools split . We have been using 1.0.0-preview4 (for .NET and project.json) and 1.0.0-msbuild3 for msbuild/csproj support.

Now the tool packages are 1.1.0 (Tools) and 1.0.0 (Tools.DotNet)

For PowerShell support: Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools 1.1.0
For dotnet CLI support: Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools.DotNet 1.0.0

In Visual Studio 2015 (for full .NET projects) and Visual Studio 2017 (shown here, for full .NET or .NET Core projects), the Package Manager will show the RTM versions:

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Notice that I do not have “Include prerelease” checked.

If using PMC to install, it’s just

install-package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools

That’s for the PowerShell tools, otherwise, add .DotNet to the name.

But notice that you no longer need to add the –pre.

When using the CLI version of the tools, the command

dotnet ef –version

results in

Entity Framework Core .NET Command Line Tools 1.0.0-rtm-10308

Changes to Migrations Commands

As the tools evolved through the previews, some details changed for example, the scaffolding command got smarter.

But one change that is notable is with respect to EF Core in class libraries. You still need to point to an executable project (exe or test) to run most of the commands, but now you can at least just use “dotnet ef” to get the help file without having to set the –startup-project parameter. There are a few other commands that will run without knowledge of the startup project. You can read more about this in this GitHub thread. Check some of the later comments by Brice Lambson as he worked on evolving the commands.

EF Core 1.1.1 – Patch

This was a more subtle part of the release. Even though the 1.1.1 milestone on GitHub had 30 bug fixes that are all closed , there hadn’t been any mention that this was going to get pushed out and the milestone had no target date on it. Though I had my suspicions! Here’s a screenshot I happened to take on March 5.

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And yes, the newest version of the EF Core packages is now 1.1.1. These are bug fixes …as the increment suggests.  Most of them are edge cases, but regardless, you should definitely update your EF Core packages to ensure you have these latest fixes. If you’re creating new projects, 1.1.1 is what you’ll see available from NuGet.

Note: there was a regression introduced in EF Core 1.1.1 that is targeted to get fixed with the next patch. You can read about this issue here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42708522/loading-related-data-aspnet-core-1-1

You can learn much more about EF Core in my EF Core: Getting Started course on Pluralsight.

Vermont .NET Birthday Cakes Throughout the Years

dotNET

As Visual Studio prepares for the VS2017 launch and the 20th anniversary of Visual Studio, I started reminiscing of Vermont.NET birthdays of the past. Our first meeting was in February 2002. Here’s a screenshot (thanks to the way back machine!) from October 2002 of our hand-made (by yours truly) ASP.NET 1.0 website:

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More fun though is the various cakes we’ve had throughout the years when we’ve celebrated the passing time.

First is the cake made by user group member Laura Blood for our Feb 2003 meeting, our first anniversary.

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According to my blog, we had cake at our Feb 2006 meeting with special guest (thank you INETA), Ken Getz. I don’t seem to have a picture though.

Another was from our 6th year. We had  a presentation on unit testing that night by Sarah Cameron who came down from Montreal.

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2010 was our 8th year. We didn’t have cake for our Feb meeting but we DID for the April meeting which was the launch of Visual Studio 2010.  Dave Burke designed this cake and it was implemented by the bakery at a local supermarket:

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For our 10th year, the supermarket bakery suggested balloons and I asked for green ones in honor of Vermont. Many jokes have been made about this cake. I did NOT see the problem until someone pointed it out at the meeting. Then we were all giggling like school boys.

Rob Hale was quick to tweet it so I was able to find this picture easily enough!

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Here was my own creation for Vermont.NET’s 12th anniversary in 2014. Notice that the sprinkles are dinosaurs. Smile

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I wasn’t here for our February 2017 meetup, but our upcoming March meetup will celebrate the VS2017 launch so I plan to make or get a cake to celebrate for sure!