With an anticipation and hope, this article would be an interesting and effective somehow. This article will be covering the Asp.Net 5’s MVC6 Welcome application. a brief about the all new concepts of MVC6 and the new structure it beholds. Then we create our first Welcome application and then have a walk through of the new Azure Portal and deploy our first web application.

The above image is all that we will be covering in our article.

Get Started

A perfect blend of cloud and web application is what Asp.Net 5 is intended for. Asp.Net 5 is now being called off as .NET core is what that stands out today. It is a framework with open source & cross platform for building cloud based web applications. Here Azure comes integrated to the Visual Studio applications. Web applications either can be deployed to cloud or be running on On-premise. .Net core is available on Visual Studio 2015 build. You can download the community edition of the Visual Studio which is actually free.
Community Edition Download. Give a try for sure!
.Net 5 core contains a small optimized run time environment called “CoreCLR” One more important point to note is, .Net Core is opensource and the progress can be updated on Github. They have the code exposed and the build can be tracked easily. .Net core is said to contain a set of libraries known as “CoreFx”. Below are the links to the Github. Just have a look:

• .Net Core Libraries (CoreFX)
• .Net Core CLR

Another important benefit is termed as “Portability”. What this means is, we can package and deploy the Core CLR which can in turn help you eliminate the dependency on the installed version of .Net framework. Multiple application running on different versions of CLR can be set ups well. This is the magic the team wanted to result out, which is great!
With .NET 5 and VS 2015 comes MVC6 into picture. Microsoft builds are moving faster than the world!
When I first looked at the structure of the Solution when i added a new MVC project, I was like What!!

Where is Global.asax.cs? Where is Web.config, App_Start?. Did I download the correct files and selected the correct template. These sort of questions were flickering in my mind. When ran the application it ran successfully as well. Strange!!

Let’s have a small trip into the MVC6

Unified MVC Controllers

MVC6, the merger, the blend of three frameworks, i.e. MVC, Web API2 & Web Pages. Previous versions of MVC, while adding a new template would prompt to check whether we want Web API along with MVC. Here we select the MVC project and we get the opportunity to work with API as well.
In previous versions there were two base controller classes, separate for normal controller and also for the Api controller, i.e. ApiController

public class TestController: Controller {

}

public class ApiTestController ; ApiController {

}

In earlier version as shown above, the controller base class were from System.Web.MVC.Controller and for API, System.Web.Http.ApiController. But in MVC6 it is only one, i.e. Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Controller.

Different style of HTML helpers

In MVC6 there comes a new title termed as Tag Helpers. They make life much more simpler. How! We will get to know once we see the code snippet.
For normal web pages, as we know the HTML helpers are defined within the System.Web.WebPages.Html under System.Web.WebPages
, whereas in MVC6, it is under the System.Web.MVC assembly..
The HTML helpers which we used to use in Razor or ASPX, were quite difficult for normal HTML developers to understand (suppose designers). Now i MVC6 that has been simplifies using the Tag Helpers.

@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
        @Html.LabelFor(m => p.EmpName, "Employee Name:")
        @Html.TextBoxFor(m => p.EmpName)
        
        <input type="submit" value="Create" />
}

But in MVC6 ,

@model AzureDemoProject.Models.Employee
@addtaghelper "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.TagHelpers" 
<form method="post">
<div><label>Employee Name:</label> <input type="text" /></div>
<input type="submit" value="Save" />

</form>

Now the second snippet looks more like HTML friendly and also a bit simple.
Mr. Damian Edwards, has posted the source code on Github which has examples of Tag Helpers. Please go through for better live understanding
Git Hub Tag Helpers Download and play around.

Support for Grunt, NPM & Bower

These are the latest trending front end development tools. These are quite new to me as well, but will be learning and posting articles on these as well in coming days. Stay tuned!!
Ok branding apart, lets have a brief idea on what these are.

Bower:-This is a client side item added by default to MVC6 project. If not added, then Right click on the project-> Add->New Item
->Installed(Client Side)-> Bower.json. You can find then the file is already installed. The file is inside the wwwroot->lib->bootsrap->bower.json. As you open up the file, you can find the client side tool packages added to the project and their versions. Thus, we got to know that the bower is a client side package manager which is used to add the front-end packages like bootstrap, jQuery, angular, etc.
Grunt:-In MVC6 project when we add, we can find the gulpfile.js, this is kind of an alternative to the Grunt as both perform the same kind of functions. The operations they perform is minification, cleaning, concatenation, etc. of both js & css files.
NPM:- Node Package Manager is present under the project with the name project.json. This holds the dependencies and their versions required by the web application we have set up.

"dependencies": {
    "EntityFramework.Commands": "7.0.0-rc1-final",
    "EntityFramework.MicrosoftSqlServer": "7.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNet": "1.0.0-rc1",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Authentication.Cookies": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Diagnostics.Entity": "7.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework": "3.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.IISPlatformHandler": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc": "6.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.TagHelpers": "6.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.StaticFiles": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Tooling.Razor": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.CodeGenerators.Mvc": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.FileProviderExtensions" : "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.UserSecrets": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug": "1.0.0-rc1-final",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.BrowserLink.Loader": "14.0.0-rc1-final"
  },
 "scripts": {
    "prepublish": [ "npm install", "bower install", "gulp clean", "gulp min" ]
  }

As we can see in the above snippet, which is just a part of the project.json file. This is to show the default dependencies added to the project and the pre publish scripts mentioned. When we suppose add a new dependency, suppose I try and add System.Linq, it will list up the Nuget package as intellisense and then we add the version which also comes under the intellisense. Like below image:

Then after hitting Ctrl+S, the restoring of the references packages starts.

Then we see the references added. For more information on the project.json file and its contents, please visit the below link:
Project.json
Integration to Cloud & optimized: This is another major boost feature added to MVC6 application. Now it comes integrated to the cloud with Microsoft Azure and also the optimizing and monitoring tool provided by Azure, i.e. Application Insights.
We will have a walk through of adding the cloud Web application and then a brief on Application insights as well.
Boosted Dependency Injection: Now MVC6 application has in built and integrated dependency injection facility. There is no more need for the packages like, Ninject, Unity, Structure Map3 and all. The code for the configuration setting for the dependency injection is added inside the StartUp.cs class file as below:

// This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
        {
            // Add framework services.
            services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry(Configuration);

            services.AddEntityFramework()
                .AddSqlServer()
                .AddDbContext(options =>
                    options.UseSqlServer(Configuration["Data:DefaultConnection:ConnectionString"]));

            services.AddIdentity<ApplicationUser, IdentityRole>()
                .AddEntityFrameworkStores()
                .AddDefaultTokenProviders();

            services.AddMvc();

            // Add application services.
            //Dependency Injection as well
            services.AddTransient<IEmailSender, AuthMessageSender>();
            services.AddTransient<ISmsSender, AuthMessageSender>();
        }

The we normally inject the services into the constructor of the controllers. Is’nt that great!!
appsettings.json: As we know there is no Web.config file in our application, but we need to have a place where we have the settings required by the application at all stages. This is this place. In MVC6, they have had a upper hand over the JSON than the XML.
The connection strings, the other app settings file we used to add inside the Web.config will now be contained here, that to in Json format. An example like below:

"Data": {
    "DefaultConnection": {
      "ConnectionString": "Server=(localdb)\\mssqllocaldb;Database=aspnet5-AzureWebAppDemo-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-XXX;Trusted_Connection=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=true"
    }
  }

global.json: This is a separate folder named Solution Items. here is the global.json file, which contains the solutions’s project references and their dependencies as well. Loos like below:

{
  "projects": [ "src", "test" ],
  "sdk": {
    "version": "1.0.0-rc1-update1"
  }
}

The appsettings is initialized into the project in the Startup.cs file as below:

var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
                .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json")
                .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true);

The App_Start which had the RouteConfig.cs file also goes missing. In MVC is present inside the Startup.cs file as below:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory)
        {
               app.UseMvc(routes =>
            {
                routes.MapRoute(
                    name: "default",
                    template: "{controller=Home}/{action=Index}/{id?}");
            });
        }

Thus, lets have a look at the entry point of the application:

// Entry point for the application.
        public static void Main(string[] args) => WebApplication.Run(args);

Another nice feature is the segregation of the Models & View Models. The Model now only will deal with the Db Entities and the context, where as the ViewModel will deal with the model classes which are required in the View binding.
This was just a brief about MVC6, more information and application building will be shown in the upcoming articles on MVC6. Now lets jump start the deployment to azure.

Head start Deployment

Now lets discuss creating a new MVC6 project from VS 2015 and then deploying to Azure, mostly I will pictorially explain you which will help understand better.

• Step 1: Create a brand new project from the Visual Studio 2015 templates. Select the cloud directly and then the Web project as we will be deploying our application to azure.
  
• Step 2: Then after giving name for the project, another window will prompt which will ask for the Microsoft Azure configurations. Web App Name, which will actually be the URL for the application after hosted on cloud.
  Then asks for the Application Service under which the application will be registered and deployed.
  Region is another important factor which might come handy in the performance of the application. Thus, we select East Asia here.
  If asked for the Database server and the application required we add a new database server or use any existing database. We skip for now the database integration.
  
• Step 3: After setting up, we land in creating our first web application and the structure is like below:
  
• Step 4: Lets have a look at project structure which gets created.
• 
• Step 5: Lets now publish and deploy our web application. Right click on the project and click ‘Publish’. We then see a window pop up like below:
• Step 6: This will now create an Application Service(Webservice) on Azure portal and also deploy our Web Application as a new Website. The status can be seen under Azure Activity :
   
  The above images are the over all status and the name of the publish package that got deployed.
• Step 7: Then navigate to the Azure portal, already notifications would be highlighted to let you know that web site is now hosted and you can browse.
  
  The status app type and the app status will update in a few minutes.

Conclusion

Thus, once the website is hosted on Azure, we can browse and run our application and share with anyone to navigate through our application. We came to know in this article how easy it is to deploy to cloud in the latest builds, making the lives of developers much easier. I will be sharing and covering the Application Insights in the next article which will follow this up. I hope this has helped in learning some facts about MVC6 and please post your feedback. Application Insights– upcoming.

References

MVC6
MVC6 Features

]]> /overview-of-mvc6-deploy-application-to-azure/feed/ 0 /working-with-json-in-mvc/ /working-with-json-in-mvc/#respond Fri, 01 Apr 2016 19:05:10 +0000 /?p=547 Introduction

JSON Java Script Object Notation , a very familiar and commonly used concept. It is a data interchange medium and is very lightweight. It is one kind of a syntax for storing and passing data. Since it is Java script object notation, it uses the java script style of syntax, but actually is text only. It also is language independent. The format would look like below:

{"Books":[
    {"name":"Asp.Net Mvc", "code":"111"},
    {"name":"Angular Js", "code":"112"},
    {"name":"Javascript", "code":"113"},
    {"name":"CLR", "code":"114"}
]}

Now this, JSON object can be created and used to POST or GET in MVC application. Usually, when we do an ajax call, we get the HTML fragments and send them to the browser or append to any DOM elements. That is acceptable, but sending HTML elements with data is not advisable, so would not that be great to send data in a specific format and the browser assigns the data into the HTML. Here, JSON comes in handy. Lets see how. I will explain in simple terms and snippets for better understanding as this topic is not complex at all.

Peek into Snippets!!

I will proceed with an anticipation that readers are aware of MVC (Model, View & Controller), as I will not be sharing the steps to create an MVC project. So, Lets start.
When we create a controller in an MVC project, we know the default type added is ActionResult, which is generic to other types of method types pre-defined like: ViewResult, JsonResult, etc.. Thus, for returning a JSON data, we can use either ActionResult or JsonResult,but preferably use JsonResult as we already know the type, the method will return. JsonResult, is actually a special ActionResult, which suggests the ViewEngine that an object of JSON type will be returned rather than normal HTML.
Lets see the snippet and then try and understand.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.MVC;
using DemoJsonTest.Models;

namespace DemoJsonTest.Controllers {
    public class EmployeeController : Controller {
        private Employee[] employeeData = {
            new Employee {Name:"Suraj Sahoo",EmpCode:"EMP042"},
            new Employee {Name:"Suraj Sharma",EmpCode:"EMP044"},
            new Employee {Name:"Suraj Ray",EmpCode:"EMP041"}
        };

    public ActionResult Index() {
        return View();
    }
   
    public JsonResult GetEmployeeDataJson(string empCode) {
        var employee = employeeData.Where(emp => emp.EmpCode == empCode).SingleOrDefault();
        return Json(employee, JsonRequestBehaviour.AllowGet);
    }

Thus,in the above code, we have shown a normal controller, in whose constructor we have explicitly initialized a model named Employee with few dummy data. Then the main part is the JsonReult method using which, we are filtering the data based on the parameter passed, here EmpCode and then returning the Json object. Mark here, we have used JsonRequestBehaviour.AllowGet. Now whats this. This has an interesting concept behind it. Usually, the browsers to avoid malicious sites trying to intercept JSON data returned, in response to a GET request, it does not respond to GET requests by default.

System.InvalidOperationException: This request has been blocked because sensitive information could be disclosed to third party web sites when this is used in a GET request. To allow GET requests, set JsonRequestBehavior to AllowGet.

The above is a part of the error thrown when we miss AllowGet. That is self explanatory actually.
We usually us ajax options, i.e. success method to process the JSON data received from the GET request and append or set to the HTML DOM elements.

<script type="text/javascript">
$.ajax({
    url: "GET REQUEST URL",
    type:"GET",
    success: function(empData) {
            var trgt = $("#tblEmployee");
            target.append("<tr><td>" + empData.Name + "</td><td>" + empData.EmpCode + "</td></tr>");
        },
    error: function() {
      //Do something..
        }

});
// ]]></script>

Thus, in the above snippet, we are fetching the data in JSON format from the GET response and binding to the table html dom.
A point to note here is that, when we assign/cast (actually) a model into JSON object and we explicitly specify few properties of the model and miss out on others, MVC framework is clever enough to first convert the model with each property into JSON and then assign default values to those properties which we have missed. Lets see an example of conversion:

{ "EmployeeId":0, "Name":"Suraj Sahoo", "EmpCode":"042",
     "IsActiveEmployee": false, "DepartmentId": null }

Mark here,that we have only specified the values of Name and the EmpCode, all other values assigned after JSON conversion by the MVC smart framework.

Conclusion

We saw and discussed a very simple and interesting topic regarding the JSON in MVC and how smartly MVC handles the conversion. This helps when we use API and then return JSON,XML to interchange and expose our data. JSON is actually an alternative to XML form of data exchange. For angular JS now a dayswhich is in demand,we use the API controller, return JSON data and take the advantage of Angular two-way binding.
I hope this helps the beginners out there learning MVC. This is a part of it. Enjoy coding. Open to suggestions. Don’t miss to add your feedback.

]]> /working-with-json-in-mvc/feed/ 0 /send-sms-using-c-application/ /send-sms-using-c-application/#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2016 12:22:25 +0000 /?p=540 Introduction

In this article I will be sharing a quick and an interesting way to send SMS using a simple C# application. I will be using ViaNett API to send messages from my application. I will be creating a simple windows form which will trigger the API and send the SMS.
Sending SMS has become a common objective for almost every site nowadays. Though they keep irritating you with continuous messages regarding their advertisements.

We use a simple REST API which provided by various providers in the market. You can try out some of them using the free trial version and send SMS. The reliable and faster one can be chosen. Also check for the Support the team provides.
I have thrown my hands at ViaNett and Twilio APIs. Here I will be discussing using ViaNett. Let’s start without actually wasting time.

Get Started

To start with, visit the ViaNett website (ViaNett Free demo Account). Sign up and register you with your email address for the free account, which will provide you with 5 free SMS.
After that, you land on a page having contents like below

Click on the Technical Api and that will navigate to different kinds of API it provides. We here would need the HTTP API in order to send the SMS, as we would be using the WebClient in order to use the API. We will be seeing the code below.
After you click on the HTTP API, you will be navigated to another page which will have the API listed under an Example like below:

Create a script to generate a URL like this: https://smsc.vianett.no/v3/send.ashx?src=xxxxx&dst=xxxxx&msg=Hello+world&username=xxxxx&password=xxxxx Retrieve this web page from your script/application, and the SMS will be sent.

This is the API URL which our Web client will be using.
Now to start with our demo application, we will be creating a windows form application. Now, I will not be writing up and lengthing my article with the step by step image for creating a Windows Form application. Those who are really new to windows form, please follow one of the best links below.
Walkthrough To create Windows Form application
After you create a simple windows form application, it would look something like below:

Create as simple as you can , as this is just for learning purpose. The UserName is the user name you had provided during the ViaNett registration i.e. the email address
The password is the password you had given during the registration in the ViaNett.
Then for the button click we have the following code:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            using (var web = new System.Net.WebClient())
            {
                try
                {
                    string userName = txtUserName.Text;
                    string userPassword = txtUserPassword.Text;
                    string msgRecepient = txtPhNumber.Text;
                    string msgText = txtMessage.Text;
                    string url = "https://smsc.vianett.no/v3/send.ashx?" +
                        "src="+msgRecepient +
                        "&dst="+msgRecepient +
                        "&msg="+System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(msgText,System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1")) +
                        "&username=" + System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(userName) +
                        "&password="+userPassword;
                    string result = web.DownloadString(url);
                    if(result.Contains("OK")){
                        MessageBox.Show("Sms sent successfully", "Message", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Information);
                    }
                    else{
                        MessageBox.Show("Some issue delivering","Message",MessageBoxButtons.OK,MessageBoxIcon.Error);
                    }
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    
                }
            }
        }

The above code would look simple rather it is.

When you select a Windows Form Application, by default System.Web  is not added to the reference list. Thus, you need to add that from the assembly list.

System.Web is required as we add the WebClient to use the API and download the response.

Here in the code, just giving a brief on what this snippet intends:

We retrieve each text input from the user, i.e. the User name, User password, Text Message & the User Phone Number. We use these as the URL params to the Service API of the ViaNett.

Then after that we will check for the response after sending the message and accordingly we update the User.

**Point to note is: The country code needs to be prefixed to the phone number, in order to send the message else it will mail back regarding the failure to the registered email.

Conclusion

Thus, this is a small article on the integration and sending SMS using C# aaplication. I hope this helps beginners!! I will come up with more articles with other APIs and their other SMS features they support.

References

ViaNett

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