Scott Hanselman

"EditorConfig helps maintain consistent coding styles for multiple developers working on the same project across various editors and IDEs." Rather than you having to keep your code in whatever format the team has agreed on, you can check in an .editorconfig file and your editor of choice will keep things in line.

If you're a .NET developer like myself, there's a ton of great .NET EditorConfig options you can set to ensure the team uses consistent Language Conventions, Naming Conventions, and Formatting Rules.

• Language Conventions are rules pertaining to the C# or Visual Basic language, for example, var/explicit type, use expression-bodied member.
• Formatting Rules are rules regarding the layout and structure of your code in order to make it easier to read, for example, Allman braces, spaces in control blocks.
• Naming Conventions are rules respecting the way objects are named, for example, async methods must end in "Async".

If you're using Visual Studios 2010, 2012, 2013, or 2015, fear not. There's at least a basic EditorConfig free extension for you that enforces the basic rules. There is also an extension for Visual Studio Code to support EditorConfig files that takes just seconds to install.

ASIDE: If you are looking for a decent default for C#, take a look at the .editorconfig that the C# Roslyn compiler team uses. I don't know about you, but my brain exploded when I saw that they used spaces vs tabs.

But! What if you want this coding formatting goodness at the dotnet command line? You can use "dotnet format" as a global tool! It's one line to install, then it's available everywhere for all your .NET Core apps.

D:\github\hanselminutes-core> dotnet tool install -g dotnet-format
You can invoke the tool using the following command: dotnet-format
Tool 'dotnet-format' (version '3.0.2') was successfully installed.
D:\github\hanselminutes-core> dotnet format
  Formatting code files in workspace 'D:\github\hanselminutes-core\hanselminutes-core.sln'.
  Found project reference without a matching metadata reference: D:\github\hanselminutes-core\hanselminutes.core\hanselminutes-core.csproj
  Formatting code files in project 'hanselminutes-core'.
  Formatting code files in project 'hanselminutes.core.tests'.
  Format complete.

You can see in the screenshot below where dotnet format used its scandalous defaults to move my end of line { to its own line! Well, if that's what the team wants! ;)

Of course, dotnet format is all open source and up at https://github.com/dotnet/format. You can install the stable build OR a development build from myGet.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Bear with me here. Apple Shortcuts (free on the App Store) is extraordinary and you shouldn't sleep on it. In fact, you should use it and explore it as it's amazing. I would go even further and say it could be a great place to learn to code!

Apple Shortcuts on iPhone is a lot like Microsoft Flow, except for your phone. Shortcuts let you string together Actions (ahem, functions) into multi-step tasks (ahem, functions that call functions). There's a rich and growing gallery of shortcuts that you can copy into your local (to your phone) library. You can then name them and invoke your Shortcuts with Siri.

Here's a few links to Shortcuts that (assuming you are reading this from your iPhone) you can add to your library with a click!

• Do Not Disturb Timer
• Expand URL
• Intelligent Power (from Reddit)
• Check Spelling
• Convert Video to GIF
• Download YouTube Video

Once you have a shortcut you can invoke it as an item/icon on your springboard/home screen, you can have Siri run it with your voice, or invoke it via a "share sheet" that is available in all apps.

It would be reasonable to think this was a simple macro system with a few basic building blocks, but I don't think Apple's team gets enough credit. This is a complete development environment on your phone.

For example, here's a incredibly intricate and powerful Shortcut if one is pulled over by the police.

It pauses any music that may be playing, turns down your brightness and volume, turns on Do Not Disturb, and sends a message to the contact of your choosing letting them know you’re being pulled over and what your current location is. It then opens your front camera and starts a video recording so you have a video record of being pulled over.

Once you stop the recording it sends a copy of the video to a contact you specify, puts volume and brightness back to where they were, turns off Do Not Disturb, and gives you the option to send to iCloud Drive or Dropbox!

You could then record a Siri shortcut and just say "Hey Siri, I'm being pulled over" and all this happens automatically, hands free.

Take a look at the Laundry Timer app here. It's a very classic "take input and do a thing" program. You can build and extend workflows like this and the data from one flows through to the next one.

Note the Shortcut above. The "Adjust Date" action pops up a Date and is used as a Diff(erence) against the "Current Date" action, then used again in the Add New Reminder as an input to "Add New Reminder." These contextual variables flow through and are easily accessible in this genius UI. It really is near-perfect. Try it.

At this point you may be thinking, um, OK, that's cute, but where's the learn to code revolution here? It's not that open-ended of a system, what can I really do?

Like many connected cars, my car has a kind of REST API that its app uses to do things like heat up the climate system. Here I can literally POST (like Curl, but on your iPhone!) to an endpoint and pass in a FORM and parse the resulting JSON. Wow! Drink that in. You can write complex functions with iOS Shortcuts. Really.

Hang on. My body has a REST API. I use the open source Nightscout project to create a REST API on top of my Diabetes Continuous Glucose Meter then surface it in places like my lighted keyboard or even my Git Prompt.

How hard would it be to - right now as I make this blog post - write a method to have Siri retrieve my blood sugar and announce it to me when I say "Siri what's my blood sugar?" Let's see!

I make a URL object with my REST API that returns my sugar as JSON, it gets passed into Get Contents of URL. That makes a Dictionary from the Input, then gets the value of "sgv" (serum glucose value) and then the result of that is used to make a string with the Text action.

Now I have Siri SAY it. I can "debug" by running the Shortcut with the play button.

Then I can Add it to Siri and record my phrase. Here's me saying "what's my blood sugar" and she's telling me. Yes, I know. I had a cookie. I deserved it.

This is just the start. It could also tell me my trend lines, text someone if it's high, make a chart, I figure can do anything! I'm going to continue to explore Shortcuts but this little NightScout one can be downloaded to YOUR phone here. You'll only need to put in YOUR own URL for your Nightscout instance.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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David Fowler is the ASP.NET Core Architect (and an amazing highly technical public speaker) and I've learned a lot from watching him code. However, what's the best way for YOU to learn from folks like David if you can't sit on their shoulder? Why, look at their GitHub!

Since .NET Core (and most of Microsoft) is not only open source but also developed in the open now on GitHub, we can actually watch folks in their day to day work as they commit code to projects like the C# compiler, .NET Core, and ASP.NET Core.

Even more interestingly, we can look at David's github here https://github.com/davidfowl and then under Repositories see what he's up to, filter by language and type, and explore! Sometimes I just explore the Pull Requests on projects like ASP.NET Core.

You can have Private repositories on GitHub, as I do, and as I'm sure David does. But GitHub is a social network for code and it's more fun and a better learning experience when we can see each others code and read it. Read with a critical eye, but without judgment as you may not have all the context that the author does. If you went to my GitHub, https://github.com/shanselman you might be disappointed but you also may be missing the big picture. Just consider that as you Follow people and explore their code.

David is an advanced .NET developer, while, for example, I am comparatively intermediate. So I realize that not all of David's code is FOR me. It's a scratchpad, it's not educational how-to workshops. However, I can get pick up cool idioms, interesting directions the tech may be going, and more importantly - prototypes and spikes. Spikes are folks testing out technical ideas. They may not be complete. In fact, they may never be complete. But some my be harbingers of things to come.

Here's a few things I learned today.

gRPC for .NET Core

For example, at https://github.com/davidfowl/grpc-dotnet I can see David has forked (copied) gRPC for dotnet and his game is working with the gRPC folks to make a fully supported version of gRPC for production workloads with .NET Core! Here are the stated goals:

• We plan to implement a fully-managed version of gRPC for .NET that will be built on top of ASP.NET Core HTTP/2 server.
• Good integration with the rest of ASP.NET Core ecosystem
• High-performance (we plan to utilize some of the cutting edge performance features from ASP.NET Core and in .NET plaform itself)

That sounds cool! I can go learn that gRPC is a modern (google sponsored) Remote Procedure Call framework that can run anywhere. It's used by Netflix and Square and supports basically any languaige and any environment. Nice for this microservice world we are entering and hopefully has learned from the sins of DCOM and CORBA and RMI, because I was there and it sucked.

Nothing to see here but moving to a new JSON serializer

This Web.Framework sounds fun, and I'll be sure to take the description to heart.

You can see David and James Newton-King kicking ideas around as you explore the commit log. However, the most interesting commit IMHO is when David moves this little spike from using JSON.NET (the ubiquitous 3rd party JSON serializer) to the new emerging official System.Text.Json. Here is the commit with unified differences.

It's a small change but it also makes me feel good about the API underneath this new JSON API that's coming. My takeway is that it's not as scary as I'd assumed. Looks like a Good Thing(tm).

Cool!

Multi-Protocol ASP.NET Core

This looks interesting.

"The following sample shows how you can host a TCP server and HTTP server in the same ASP.NET Core application. Under the covers, it's the same server (Kestrel) running different protocols on different ports. The ConnectionHandler is a new primitive introduced in ASP.NET Core 2.1 to support non-HTTP protocols."

I didn't know you could do that! Looks like this sample hasn't changed much since it was conceived of in 2018, but then in the last month it's been updated twice and it appears to be part of a larger, slow-moving architectural issue called Bedrock that's moving forward.

I learned that Kestral (the ASP.NET Core web server) has a "ListenLocalhost" option on its options object!

WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
  .ConfigureServices(services =>
  {
      // This shows how a custom framework could plug in an experience without using Kestrel APIs directly
      services.AddFramework(new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Loopback, 8009));
  })
  .UseKestrel(options =>
  {
      // TCP 8007
      options.ListenLocalhost(8007, builder =>
      {
          builder.UseConnectionHandler<MyEchoConnectionHandler>();
      });
  
      // HTTP 5000
      options.ListenLocalhost(5000);
  
      // HTTPS 5001
      options.ListenLocalhost(5001, builder =>
      {
          builder.UseHttps();
      });
  })
  .UseStartup<Startup>();

I can see here that TCP port 8007 is customer and uses a custom ConnectionHandler which I also didn't know existed! I can then look at the implementation of that handler and it's cool how clean the API is. You can get the result cleanly off the Transport buffer. You're doing low-level TCP but it doesn't feel low level.

using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Connections;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging;

namespace KestrelTcpDemo
{
    public class MyEchoConnectionHandler : ConnectionHandler
    {
        private readonly ILogger<MyEchoConnectionHandler> _logger;

        public MyEchoConnectionHandler(ILogger<MyEchoConnectionHandler> logger)
        {
            _logger = logger;
        }

        public override async Task OnConnectedAsync(ConnectionContext connection)
        {
            _logger.LogInformation(connection.ConnectionId + " connected");

            while (true)
            {
                var result = await connection.Transport.Input.ReadAsync();
                var buffer = result.Buffer;

                foreach (var segment in buffer)
                {
                    await connection.Transport.Output.WriteAsync(segment);
                }

                if (result.IsCompleted)
                {
                    break;
                }

                connection.Transport.Input.AdvanceTo(buffer.End);
            }

            _logger.LogInformation(connection.ConnectionId + " disconnected");
        }
    }
}

Pretty slick. This just echos what is sent to that port but not only has it educated me about a thing I didn't know about, it's something I can mentally file away until I need it!

All of these things I learned in just 30 minutes of exploring someone's public repository.

What kinds of code do you like to read and what have you learned from just poking around?

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I wanted to see what was the fastest way to get an ASP.NET Core web site up (for free) on Azure. First, I could use Visual Studio Community (which is free), and just right click Publish, sign into Azure, and make a free Web App and I'm cool. But I also wanted to see what it was like on Visual Studio Code (which would work on Linux, etc)

I downloaded these things. This is 10-15 min tops for download AND install. Likely less on a fast connection.

• VS Code https://code.visualstudio.com
• .NET Core https://dotnet.microsoft.com
• Azure App Service extension for VS Code
• C# extension for VS Code (NOTE: this will get automatically recommended to you anywhere when you open a .cs file for the first time.

This also assumes you have a free Azure account https://azure.microsoft.com/free/

I made a new ASP.NET web site with "dotnet new razor" at the command line. The Azure App Service extension makes a new Azure icon appear on the left of VS Code. I can see my subscription(s) and any sites I've made before. I can right-click the top of the tree or just click the + plus sign.

TRICK: The default mode of the Azure App Service extension is "basic" mode. This is fine for messing around, but it will assume a bunch of things. You don't have control over the location (it'll pick a nearby one) or really anything. Again, it's fine. However, if you DO want explicit prompts for name, location, OS, runtime, etc you can turn on "appService.advanced" in File | Preferences | Settings (or Ctrl+,). Don't feel you need to, but know it's possible.

Now, in my opinion, deploying apps (.NET Core, Node, or otherwise) directly from source can be a little confusing, and it doesn't really scale for anything other than proofs of concept. There's usually a "build" step, and ideally you'll have a CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline for anything of any real size. It's easier than you think - you can likely get a basic DevOps pipeline up in a hour or so. I commit to GitHub and it just deploys to Azure.

That said, a quickie deploy has value so I wanted to do it. You can do a "git deploy" to Azure where Azure is a git remote and you just "git push azure master" but...you're pushing source and Azure "builds" it in Azure App Service using a thing called Kudu. That means it'll run npm install, dotnet restore, etc, it'll take some time. You could deploy a container to Azure and just push it to a Container Registry, then spin up the container.

However, Azure also has a little known but rather clever "zipdeploy" feature. Once you've configured your Azure App Service for zipdeployment as a source, you can just POST a new ZIP deployment with Curl!

curl -X POST -u <deployment_user> --data-binary @"<zip_file_path>" https://<app_name>.scm.azurewebsites.net/api/zipdeploy

You might find that weird, or you might find it elegant. If it's the latter, use it. If it's the former, don't. You can even do it with minimal or no downtime by deploying to a staging slot and use Auto Swap.

I'm going to use the Azure App Service extension in VS Code and it's going to hide all of this and it'll just publish in one click.

Here's the important part if you want it to just work and work easily. You'll want to deploy from a folder that represents your published app. That means your app in a state that it's ready to go.

With .NET Core, the easiest way is to dotnet publish. Then I'm right clicking on that publish folder as seen in this screenshot. Given that the extension is zipping up the target folder and deploying it, I want publish the publish folder, not the root of my source folder.

That will actually make a file .vscode/settings.json that will tell VS Code's Azure App Service extension what folder to deploy from in the future, thereby simplifying things.

{
    "appService.defaultWebAppToDeploy": "/subscriptions/GUID/resourceGroups/appsvc_rg_Windows_CentralUS/providers/Microsoft.Web/sites/fancyweb1",
    "appService.deploySubpath": "bin\\Debug\\netcoreapp2.2\\publish"
}

Below you can see the dialog that pops up "Always deploy the workspace ___ to ___" if you click Yes that will create the setting above specific to your application.

Now when I deploy, I can right click from anywhere and it will zipdeploy right to my site. Note the log below.

With this extension I can even right click and "Start Streaming Logs" and get output of the logs of your Azure App Service as it runs, right in the output pane of VS Code.

This will make things pretty easy for my simplest sites and proofs of concept. Give it a try!

---

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've been exploring nopCommerce. It's an open source e-commerce shopping cart. I spoke at their conference in New York a few years ago and they were considering moving to open source and cross-platform .NET Core from the Windows-only .NET Framework, so I figured it was time for me to check in on their progress.

I headed over to https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce and cloned the repo. I have .NET Core 2.2 installed that I grabbed here. You can check out their official site and their live demo store.

It was a simple git clone and a "dotnet build" and it build and ran quite immediately. It's always nice to have a site "just work" after a clone (it's kind of a low bar, but no matter what the language it's always a joy when it works.)

I have SQL Express installed but I could just as easily use SQL Server for Linux running under Docker. I used the standard SQL Server Express connection string: "Server=localhost\SQLEXPRESS;Database=master;Trusted_Connection=True;" and was off and running.

It's got a very complete /admin page with lots of Commerce-specific reports, the ability to edit the catalog, have sales, manage customers, deal with product reviews, set promotions, and more. It's like WordPress for Stores. Everything you'd need to put up a store in a few hours.

nopCommerce has a very rich plugin marketplace. Basically anything you'd need is there but you could always write your own in .NET Core. For example, if I want to add Paypal as a payment option, there's 30 plugins to choose from!

NOTE: If you have any theming issues (css not showing up) with just using "dotnet build," you can try "msbuild" or opening the SLN in Visual Studio Community 2017 or newer. You may be seeing folders for plugins and themes not being copied over with dotnet build. Or you can "dotnet publish" and run from the publish folder.

Now, to be clear, I just literally cloned the HEAD of the actively developed version and had no problems, but you might want to use the most stable version from 2018 depending on your needs. Either way, nopCommerce is a clean code base that's working great on .NET Core. The community is VERY active, and there's a company behind the open source version that can do the work for you, customize, service, and support.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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