MVC in ASP.NET Core: The new kid on the block

Fanie Reynders

• 2 min read

For the past year I've been organizing a local developer user group called Fixxup. Last week was the first event of 2016 and I talked about MVC in ASP.NET Core, a brand new framework for the next generation of the .NET Platform, and show how you can quickly get on-board using it - even your current MVC & Web API knowledge.

Here's the recording of the talk as well as the slides:

A quick write-up on my last demo

This week's Fixxup was all about IoT with Windows and MVC in ASP.NET Core. We had a blast!

In my demo about MVC in ASP.NET Core, there wasn't enough time to properly take you thru building a simple Web API from scratch, only using the bare essentials. In the demo I showed how easy it to quickly create a Greeter API with a GET and a POST to showcase Attribute Routing, basic model binding and configuring the HTTP request middleware.

Here's a quick write up on what I wanted to demo:

Requirements

As far as requirements are concerned, you would only need:

  • an installation of the latest ASP.NET Runtime (head to http://get.asp.net to get started quickly on your platform of choice)
  • your favorite text editor of choice. For this demo I used Visual Studo Code, but you could literally use anything, even good o'l Notepad.

Project.json

Start creating a new JSON file called project.json and add the following dependencies:

  • Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel the new blazing fast managed HTTP server
  • Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Core the core bits of ASP.NET MVC
  • Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Formatters.Json which is the JSON formatter

Furthermore, we need to configure a command to run when everything starts up. This can be anything and you can have more than one command. For the demo I've decided to go with a command named api that will simply fire up the Kestrel server. Lastly, we target the full .NET Framework (dnx46) as well as .NET Core:

{
    "dependencies": {
        "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel":"1.0.0-rc1-final",
        "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Core":"6.0.0-rc1-final",
        "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Formatters.Json":"6.0.0-rc1-final"
    },
    "commands": {
        "api":"Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel"
    },

    "frameworks": {
        "dnx46":{},
        "dnxcore50":{}
    }
}

Startup.cs

The next step is to configure our dependencies and wire up the request pipline middleware. We create a new class called Startup.cs and add the void ConfigureServices(...) and void Configure(...) methods to it, where we configure the dependency insjection for the needed services and use them respectively.

using Microsoft.AspNet.Builder;  
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

public class Startup  
{
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){
        services
            .AddMvcCore()
            .AddJsonFormatters();
    }
    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app){
        app.UseMvc();
    }
}

You will notice that we have integrated support for DI from the start, making it possible to inject host-level dependencies into our program.

The Greet Controller

Now that all the plumbing is done, the last thing we need to do is implement a Controller to do some work. Here we have a basic controller called GreetController that has two endpoints: One GET action that will greet the given user name, and one POST that will create a greeting, accepting a GreetingDTO data transfer object.

Here we can see this class is a plain class, with no explicit dependencies on the base Controller class. MVC is clever enough to wire this up for us using convention.

using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc;

[Route("[controller]")]
public class GreetController  
{
    [Route("{name}")]
    public string Get(string name){
        return $"Hello {name}";
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public IActionResult CreateGreeting([FromBody]GreetDTO greeting){
        return new CreatedAtActionResult("Get","Greet", new { name = greeting.Message }, "Greeting created ya'll!");
    }
}

public class GreetDTO  
{
    public string Message { get; set; }
}

That's it!

Now all that is left to do is to take it for a spin. From Command Prompt, simply run dnx api and the server will start hosting on http://localhost:5000.