Tag Archives: aspnet5

OSX, ASPNetCore, EFCore and CoreCLI, oh my!

Data Access, , , ,

After moving some RC1 test projects from windows over to my MacBook, it was time to start from scratch in OS X to see what that experience was like. Installing all the right pieces. I’d been using Visual Studio Code already on windows for nodes programming, but doing that for an ASP.NET 5 project is a little harder since the debugging for that isn’t implemented yet. At the same time I’m still getting used to navigating my way around a Mac … keystrokes, bash commands etc.

But I did get a small sample worked out and even used PostgreSQL to do the job.

That (remember, RC1) little test is on github here: github.com/julielerman/ef7osxtest.

But RC2 is a different beast!

Addendum because so many have asked: I am using the nightly builds of RC2. It is not out yet!

DNX is transitioning to CoreCLI with new underlying APIs. And there was that name change. ASPNET 5 became ASP.NET Core and EF7 became EF Core. The package and namespaces have changed.

And in the meantime, EF7/EFCore is still going through changes with RC2. To me the most significant is the work the team has been doing to help with disconnected graphs. You can read the latest (and I think final) state of how EF will handle disconnected graphs here on github.

I tried a few paths to starting a new project to try out RC2. Here’s some twitter evidence:

I had watched the video of David Fowler & Damien Edward’s talk about Core CLI from NDC London and David did the demos on a mac.

But it took a tweet from Tony Sneed to remind me that I could get David’s demos from github:

Indeed, that was the best starting point. I cloned that repository onto my MacBook and made sure I could run all three projects.

Now I’m working on building out the HelloMVC project by adding in the model, dbcontext, controllers and other relevant bits from my RC1.

At the moment (as of Feb 1 2016), the dotnet ef migrations commands aren’t working but Brice Lambson is working hard on it and says that should be pushed up this week. (Watch this github issue.)

And it might be a while before the Postgres provider gets updated to work with the new namespaces and package dependencies  but we do have the Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite provider that will work on OS X although there seem to be a lot of problems at the moment with that on Linux. But I’ll be trying that out anyway.

Visual Studio 2015, Command Prompt & Powershell ExecutionPolicy

Tools, ,

Just a hint in case you run into this problem that took a few days to discover the pattern.

I have the Productivity Power Tools 2015 installed as an extension to VS2015. These are from Microsoft and there are a ton of features in there that I can’t live without.

With this I can right click on a solution or project in Solution Explorer and open a command prompt at the relevant path.

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I mostly use this feature to get to posh-git to run some git commands.

posh-git is a PowerShell enhanced environment for the git command line.

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There are plenty of other reasons you may want to use PowerShell interactively with Visual Studio. Working with ASPNET5 apps is a very good reason.

The problem I encountered was that occasionally, I would get into PowerShell but my Execution-Policy was, for some reason, Restricted, so I couldn’t trigger posh-git.

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I finally figured out how to ensure I entered the command prompt with my normal Unrestricted ExecutionPolicy.

Be sure to open the Package Manager Console in Visual Studio first. That starts up Powershell with the correct policy. Then when you open your command prompt, you are good to go.