Category Archives: dotNET

EF Core Fundamentals for EF Core 7 (Pluralsight)

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Last spring Pluralsight published my 7.5 hour EF Core Fundamentals course. I hope that given my history with EF, EF Core , my books, talks and courses that you will already know that it’s a very good and in-depth course. And the response to the course has been great!

Unfortunately the course has the version number in it: It is really called EF Core 6 Fundamentals which I believe causes devs using the current version (EF Core 7) to hesitate watching the course.

These fundamentals do not really change from one version to the next. It is the advanced features that the EF Core team is evolving.  The course is still totally relevant for EF Core 7 and you can use EF Core 7 to work through the course.

There are new features you should be aware of that I covered in the EF Core 7: It Just Keeps Getting Better article in Code Magazine’s, Code Focus issue on .NET 7 such as bulk updates and deletes, mapping stored procedures and more (some of which I would consider “fundamental”, others a bit more advanced).  But the basics  continue to work just as they do in EF Core 6. 

There’s no need to shy away from either of these courses or any of the others on the EF Core 6 track  on Pluralsight if you are using EF Core 7.

In fact, I have updated every single project from the course to EF Core 7 and except for one small tweak (not even related to EF Core) in the API Testing demo (from Module 13), every demo ran exactly the same in EF Core 7 as it does in EF Core 6.

All of the updated projects are in a new branch in the PluralsightEFCore6Fundamentals GItHub repo dedicated to the source code for the course.

Because of the course length and the fact that EF Core 7 is not a Long-Term Support (LTS) version, Pluralsight and I decided not to update this course. Many of the EF Core and ASP.NET core courses went the same way.

I also created a much more advanced course called EF Core 6 and Domain-Driven Design. While I was forced to put “6” in this course title and defaulted to EF Core 6 for all of the lessons, anywhere that EF Core 7 features or behaviors were different, I called them out in that course.

So there’s no need to shy away from either of these courses or any of the others on the EF Core 6 track  on Pluralsight if you are using EF Core 7.

New EF Core and Domain-Driven Design Course on Pluralsight!

Data Access, DDD, dotNET, , , ,

MY NEW Pluralsight COURSE IS OUT! EF Core 6 and Domain-Driven Design. Yippee! I spent 3 months heads down on this (and years preparing for it!)

This happily aligns with a current 50% off sale on annual subscriptions.

Also note that as with *all* PS courses, they are limited to “expanded” library for the first few days but this will be part of the standard library (available to all) hopefully by the end of this week.

Short description
“Data persistence is important to your application workflow. This course will teach you how to use Entity Framework Core 6 and 7 effectively to persist data from your DDD designed software.”

Content
The module titles should give you a better flavor of this course:

  • Understanding Where EF Core 6 Fits Alongside DDD (Includes an overview of DDD)
  • Analyzing and Planning Our Domain (Strategic and tactical design walkthrough)
  • Exploring the Contract Bounded Context Solution
  • Adding the First EF Core DbContext
  • Tuning Default Mappings for the Data Model
  • Using Integration Tests to Validate Persistence
  • Reasoning About Many-to-Many Variations
  • Mapping Aggregates to Azure CosmosDB
  • Organizing Persistence Logic to Support DDD Design (Repositories, services, search and sharing data and events across bounded contexts)

Enjoy!

Follow My Explorations into AWS for .NET Developers

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Earlier this year, a friend who is a dev advocate for .NET on AWS reached out to me to see if I had any awareness at all about the support Amazon Web Services has for .NET developers and .NET applications. My answer was a definite no. I’m an Azure fan girl and had never even thought about .NET on AWS. When he started rattling off some of what’s available, APIs, tooling and a dedicated team, I was surprised.

And curious.

So I have spent quite a bit of time sating that curiosity. I’ve written two articles that were published in Code Magazine this summer and recently published a course on Pluralsight. I still love Azure (and all my friends who work on Azure), but I’m glad to have deeper familiarity of other options. This makes me a better developer as well as a better consultant to my clients.

My focus has not been on deep DevOps or comparisons to Azure. I just wanted to see how things work and try it out. And I was definitely impressed.

I did all of the work in Visual Studio on my Windows machine because there is a very feature rich extension called AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. There are also extension for VS Code, JetBrains’ Rider and other IDEs (not just for .NET). The ones for VS Code and Rider are more focused on serverless apps so they don’t have all of the features of the one for Visual Studio.

Since I’ve already created so much content, I’m not going to reiterate it all here but I wanted to be sure you are aware of the articles and the course and…the fact that there is such a thing as .NET on AWS. Whether, like me, you are curious, or like others, you are a .NET developer who has been tasked to learn about using AWS, I hope you find them interesting. Here’s what I’ve created thus far:

Discovering AWS for .NET Developers
Article, May/June 2020 Code Magazine

This is about first foray. Creating an account, installing the toolkit into Visual Studio, creating a SQL Server database (on AWS), pointing a .NET Core 3.1 App with EF Core to use that database, then (using the AWS toolkit), publishing the application to AWS.

Transform Your ASP.NET Core API into AWS Lambda Functions
Article. July/August 2020 Code Magazine

This is the next foray. I took the application from the first article, transformed it into an AWS serverless application (mostly by adding a few files provided by a project template), then publishing it to AWS. In the end, AWS creates a Lambda serverless function in front of the API, which means you get the benefit of the billing that is only based on calls coming through function. That compares to the cost of having the application running and waiting for requests 24/7. 

Fundamentals of Building .NET Applications on AWS
Pluralsight course, 2.5 hours. Published Aug 7, 2020

The course leans on what I learned through the articles but also allowed me to spend more time explaining and teaching additional information. In the course, I walk through creating an account, installing the toolkit, creating the SQL Server database, publishing the .NET Core/EF Core app and publishing the serverless app. There is an additional lesson which is about publishing the application as docker containers, fully managed by AWS via a service called Fargate. There’s a lot more detail than the articles and I’m really walking you through  step by step from start to end for each task.

I hope you’ll find the articles and course helpful and interesting, especially, if like me, you had no idea all of this support for .NET devs exist from AWS. 

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?

 

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:

image

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.

image

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.

vtdotnet6b

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:

IMG_3373

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!

730514006

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

Image result for cake vtdotnet

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!

Updated My EFCore / WebAPI / PostreSQL / XUnit Repo to 1.1

Data Access, dotNET, Uncategorized, , ,

Today was dedicated to updating my long running repository sample that I started when EF Core was EF 7  to the newest version of EF Core: 1.1. Here is the updated repo: https://github.com/julielerman/EFCore-ASPNetCore-WebAPI-RTM.

Phase one of this update continues to use project.json.

In addition to updating the version #s of  the Nuget package references, I also made some changes to the code to reflect a few new features.

Pay attention to the tooling packages. In the tools section, the package name has changed – note DotNet at the end –  and the version is currently 1.0.0-preview3 even though IIS version is preview2.

 "tools": {
   "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration.Tools": 
       "1.0.0-preview2-final",
   "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools.DotNet":
       "1.0.0-preview3-final"
 },

Also in the dependencies, the EFCore Design package is 1.1.0 like the rest of EFCore. That’s part of the EF APIs, not tooling.

Code changes ….

You’ll discover the DbSet.Find method and change tracker Load method in use in the repository class. These were both added in to EF Core 1.1.

I modified the WeatherEvent class to fully encapsulate its Reactions collection using the support for mapping to IEnumerable. That resulted in some changes to constructors and the addition of an AddReaction method and a local variable.

Unrelated to EF Core, I also modified the SeedData.cs class. It reads a hard coded seeddata.json file to read in seed data. That data used old dates. I wanted the data to show current dates to help me tell that I really and truly pushed new data into the database. Since the Date property of WeatherEvent is private, they way I went about this was to read the raw JSON and update the date value that way then save the raw JSON back to the original file. Then I deserialize the JSON with a current range of dates into a set of WeatherEvents. This also means that I added Delete/Create database back in so the database gets thrown away and recreated/reseeded every time you start up the application.

The tests are also update to use the latest packages. In addition to changing the versions, I had to add a reference to an older package (InternalServices) as its dependency has not yet been updated in xunit.

Here’s the full project.json for the test project since I had to do a bunch of googling to figure it out.

{
 "version": "3.0.0-*",
 "description": "Tests for simple app using aspnetcore, efcore and   
                  postgresql. developed and run on OSX.",
 "authors": [ "Julie Lerman" ],
 "testRunner": "xunit",
 "dependencies": {
   "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.InMemory": "1.1.0",
   "src": "3.0.0",
   "xunit": "2.2.0-beta4-build3444",
   "dotnet-test-xunit": "2.2.0-preview2-build1029",
   "Microsoft.DotNet.InternalAbstractions":"1.0.0"},
 "frameworks": {
 "netcoreapp1.0": {
   "dependencies": {
     "Microsoft.NETCore.App": {
     "type": "platform",
     "version": "1.1.0"
     }
   },
   "imports": [
     "dnxcore50",
     "portable-net45+win8"
     ]
   }
  }
}

I hope you find this repository useful to see EF Core 1.1 in action.

Oh and as per a tweet by Brad Wilson, I added SDK to my global.json file!

Now I have to go learn about why this is important. Clearly it is!

 

Video of My .NET on a Mac Demo at DotNetFringe

Data Access, dotNET, Tools, , , , ,

Last week at the awesome DotNetFringe conference in Portland, Oregon, I did a 30 minute demo of building an ASP.NET Web API with Entity Framework using Visual Studio Code on my lovely MacBookPro. So it’s .NET on a mac (coding, debugging and running). It is *that* cross platform.

I also talked about some of the features of ASPNetCore and EFCore. I used other cross platform stuff like JetBrains’ DataGrip IDE for interacting with numerous databases on numerous platforms, PostgreSQL database, xunit for testing and more!

It was a boatload of fun and it’s on YouTube:

The solution I showed in the demo is in my github repository: julielerman/EFCore-ASPNetCore-WebAPI-RTM

My Twitter Notes from Scott Guthrie Keynote at DevConnections

dotNET

Here are my twitter notes from the Scott Gutrhie keynote at DevConnections yesterday morning.

I have just done a quick copy/paste job. Read them from the bottom up!

 VS2010 Generate Class on the fly: RT @bsuzy: @julielermanvt excellent video on that here http://bit.ly/3J0AzW (via http://bit.ly/YTDwU)about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck

  •  

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  • and.. @scottgu is repeating that LINQ to SQL is FULLY SUPPORTED in .NET 4 . Not a new message, but people believe him. Glad when he says itabout 20 hours ago from TweetDeck

     

     

  •   #devconnections – @scottgu so far showing some of the awesome improvements to the text editing (searching, etc) in VS2010 IDE about 21 hours ago from TweetDeck

  •   in @scottgu keynote at #devconnections – vs2010 & asp.net 4. not a lot of people (who have normal lives) here have installed the beta yetabout 21 hours ago from TweetDeck

    • and no onto ASP.NET MVC (@scottgu at #devconnections…..)about 20 hours ago from TweetDeck

    Notes from Scott Guthrie ASP.NET 4/VS2010 keynote

    dotNET

    Update: Added the tweets to a blog post here.

    I’m at DevConnections and sat in on Scott Guthrie’s keynote.

    I tweeted a lot of notes throughout the session.

    http://www.twitter.com/julielermanvt

    I’ll try to consolidate them at some point.

    There’s a lot coming from te #devconnections hash on twitter. You don’t need to have an account to read this stuff. I didn’t use the hashtag on all of my tweets from the session, thoughI tried.