At the .NET Conf 2023, Microsoft announced a kind of toolset to build cloud-native applications. That announcement was kind of hidden in a talk done by Glenn Condron and David Fowler about building cloud-native applications using .NET 8, which was also announced at that conference. This talk actually was about .NET Aspire, which I will quickly introduce with this post. Let's start first by answering a question. When I did a talk about .NET Aspire recently at the .NET user group in Basel (CH), one individual in the audience asked me the following question: What is a cloud-native application? Le ..read more

For about a year, I was working on a pretty exciting project. I defined and created a new role for our company that is responsible for application security. Actually, application security was never a missing aspect of our development process. All my colleagues were great developers and highly motivated to create secure applications. The actual problem was a missing standard, that sets up every project in the same secure way, which helps the QA to also test security aspects, use the same tools to improve the software quality and software security and keep the awareness on security during the en ..read more

What is Playwright? Playwright is a Web UI testing framework that supports different languages and is maintained by Microsoft. Playwright can be used with JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java and for sure C#. It comes with windowless browser support with various browsers. It has to be used with unit testing frameworks and because of this, you can just run it within your CI/CD pipeline. The syntax is pretty intuitive and I actually love it. Besides that the documentation is really good and helps a lot to easily start working with it. In this blog post, I don't want to introduce Playwright. Actua ..read more

Finally! After months of not writing a blog post, here it is: A GitHub Issue on the ASP.NET Core Docs points me to Polly CircuitBreaker. Which is really great. Before that, I didn't even know that circuit breakers is a term in the software industry. Actually, I implemented mechanisms that work like that but never called them circuit breakers. Maybe that's the curse of never having visited a university :-D http://www.thepollyproject.org/ What is a circuit breaker? Let's assume you have a connection to an external resource that breaks from time to time, which doesn't break your application but d ..read more

I'm thinking about changing the console setup I use for some development tasks on Windows. The readers of this block already know that I'm a console guy. I'm using git and docker in the console only. I'm navigating my folders using the console. I even used the console to install, update or uninstall tools using Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/). This post is not a tutorial on how to install and use the tools I'm going to mention here. It is just a small portrait of what I'm going to use. Follow the links to learn more about the tools. PowerShell and oh-my-posh Actually, working in the conso ..read more

In this post, I'm going to write about how to enable and use Globalization in ASP.NET Core. Since you don't can change the culture depending on route values by default, I show you how to create and register a custom RequestCultureProvider that does this job Resources Files Like in the old time of the .NET Framework, the resources (strings, images, icons, etc.) for different languages are stored in so-called resource files that end with resx stored in a folder called Resources by default. Unlike in the good old time of the .NET Framework, the right resource files will be fetched automatically b ..read more

In this post, I'm going to write about how to enable and use Globalization in ASP.NET Core. Since you don't can change the culture depending on route values by default, I show you how to create and register a custom RequestCultureProvider that does this job Resources Files Like in the old time of the .NET Framework, the resources (strings, images, icons, etc.) for different languages are stored in so-called resource files that end with resx stored in a folder called Resources by default. Unlike in the good old time of the .NET Framework, the right resource files will be fetched automatically b ..read more

Release candidate 1 of ASP.NET Core 7 is out for around two weeks and the release date isn't that far. The beginning of November usually is the time when Microsoft is releasing the new version of .NET. Please find the announcement post here: ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 7 Release Candidate 1. I will not repeat this post but pick some personal highlights to write about. ASP.NET Core Roadmap for .NET 7 First of all, a look at the ASP.NET Core roadmap for .NET 7 shows us, that there are only a few issues open and planned for the upcoming release. That means the release is complete and almost only ..read more

Finally, Microsoft added output caching to the ASP.NET Core 7.0 preview 6. Output caching is a middleware that caches the entire output of an endpoint instead of executing the endpoint every time it gets requested. This will make your endpoints a lot faster. This kind of caching is useful for APIs that provide data that don't change a lot or that gets accessed pretty frequently. It is also useful for more or less static pages, e.g. CMS output, etc. Different caching options will help you to fine-tune your output cache or to vary the cache based on header or query parameter. For more dynamic pa ..read more

It seems he Minimal API that got introduced in ASP.NET Core 6.0 will now be finished in 7.0. One feature that was heavily missed in 6.0 was the File Upload, as well as the possibility to read the request body as a stream. Let's have a look how this would look alike. The Minimal API Creating endpoints using the Minimal API is great for beginners, or to create small endpoints like for microservice applications, or of your endpoints need to be super fast, without the overhead of binding routes to controllers and actions. However, endpoints created with the Minimal API might be quite useful. By ad ..read more