This article is the fourth in a series of articles about the Datasync Community Toolkit, which is a set of open source libraries for building client-server applications where the application data is available offline. The Datasync Community Toolkit allows you to connect to any database, use any authentication, and provides robust authorization rules. You implement each side of the application (...
This article is the third in a series of articles about the Datasync Community Toolkit, which is a set of open source libraries for building client-server applications where the application data is available offline. The Datasync Community Toolkit allows you to connect to any database, use any authentication, and provides robust authorization rules. You implement each side of the application (c...
This article is the second in a series of articles about the Datasync Community Toolkit, which is a set of open source libraries for building client-server applications where the application data is available offline. The Datasync Community Toolkit allows you to connect to any database, use any authentication, and provides robust authorization rules. You implement each side of the application...
This article is the first in a series of articles about the Datasync Community Toolkit, which is a set of open source libraries for building client-server applications where the application data is available offline. Unlike, for example, Firebase or AWS AppSync (which are two competitors in this space), the Datasync Community Toolkit allows you to connect to any database, use any authenticatio...
This is the last article in a trio of articles about incorporating Keycloak into .NET Aspire applications. Thus far, I’ve covered the basics and some common customizations. This part covers what you need to do if you want to store the identity information within a PostgreSQL database. I’ve chosen PostgreSQL for this because it seems to be the database of choice for Aspire when you want to ru...
In my last article, I introduced the Keycloak identity service and showed how the development version can be easily integrated into a project. Development services get you started quickly and allow you to defer the details until later on. At some point, however, you need to take control of your service and start working towards production. There are a number of things that the development ve...
In my series on ASP.NET Identity, I mentioned (several times) that you should be using Keycloak, Auth0, Corbado, or another identity service instead of rolling your own. That’s all good, but I left it up to you to figure out exactly how to do that. I thought it would be a good idea to configure an Aspire project from the beginning and show how authentication and authorization with a service w...
This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup. Account registration. Signing in and out with a username and password. Password reset. Email confirmations. Social logins. Now that I have the basic flows sorted out (which includes username/password with re...
This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup. Account registration. Signing in and out with a username and password. Password reset. Email confirmations. Social logins. Today is the final spot for the basic flows. Up to this point, I’ve been logging li...
This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup. Account registration. Signing in and out with a username and password. Password reset. Email confirmations. Social logins. I’ve already implemented the registration and login/logout functionality. I’ve also ...
This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup. Account registration. Signing in and out with a username and password. Password reset. Email confirmations. Social logins. Today, I’m tackling authentication - that is, signing in and out of an account using...
This article is one of a number of articles I will write over the coming month and will go into depth about the ASP.NET Identity system. My outline thus far: Project setup. Account registration. Signing in and out with a username and password. Password reset. Email confirmations. Social logins. As you may remember from the last article, the first user journey I am going to impl...
You may have noticed that I included ASP.NET Identity in a project a couple of posts ago. I’m currently doing a deep dive into ASP.NET Identity with an eye towards an OIDC identity service based on OpenIddict. Identity is a complex topic and I still recommend that developers integrate another service rather than write their own: Keycloak is a good option if you have to store your own data...
If you recall my last article, I transitioned my working application to .NET Aspire. This opinionated pattern allows me to run a complete microservice application within Docker Desktop, but then seamlessly deploy to Azure Container Apps and other platform services with the same code base. I don’t need to worry about where my database is going to be - it’s done for me. This is a great product...
I’ve been working on a new project recently. It requires that I work with microservices and containers as it will eventually be runnable on either Kubernetes or (more likely) Azure Container Apps. My latest bit is to get ASP.NET identity working with PostgreSQL. And here lies a problem. In order to properly debug the code, I need the ASP.NET bits to be running locally. But to integrate wit...
Applications are read more often than they are written. The normal situation when a developer comes onto a project is that anything from a couple of weeks to several months is requried to come “up to speed” on the code base. Making the efforts required for readability of the code is important, and I spend a ton of time up front to ensure my applications are understandable without needing an in...
Today, I’d like to talk about the best way to centrally manage dependencies in your dotNET solutions. It’s common for a single solution to comprise multiple projects. The happy path for maintaining dependencies in Visual Studio involves right-clicking on the project and selecting “Manage NuGet packages…”. Once you have a set of packages, you can keep them in sync by right-clicking on the sol...
There are times when I look at code I have written and think to myself “there has to be a better way.” When I start thinking like this, I start by looking at the documentation - the .NET official documentation is incredibly well written and simple to digest, and the fundamentals section is something I believe every language documentation should aspire to. Take exceptions, for example. When I...
I’m building a new web application with ASP.NET Core, and I’m using Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit so that I can really dive deep into the benefits and problems of using VS Code as a Visual Studio replacement. A frontend project is a good one to start with since I can check out the ways that the solution is presented while still having all the goodness of the VS Code development experie...
For the longest time, the Controller was the only way to introduce an API into your application. With the latest versions of ASP.NET Core, Minimal APIs became available. These offered the potential to write less code and be more efficient since they didn’t carry the baggage of the controller with them. That does come with some drawbacks, however. For me, one of the main ones is that it is so...
This week, I am adding a test framework to my ESM module template. I use a testing framework for both unit testing and integration testing. Like everything, test frameworks have evolved, and no test framework is suitable for all situations. However, it is one of those things you have to do if your project is destined to be long-lived. You should get into the habit of adding tests even if your...
You may have noticed that I am developing a new project from my last couple of articles: TypeScript, ES Modules, and root-relative imports Building TypeScript projects with the swc compiler The project is a command line tool written in TypeScript and will be distributed on npmjs.org eventually. I’m still working on the application, so it will be a while before it’s released. Today, I’m ...
In my last article, I set up a small project that I’m going to use for TypeScript development using ES modules that are “root-relative” - i.e. I don’t have to provide a relative path. I can use a path like #root/relative/path.js instead so that the code doesn’t change if I decide to move the source file I’m working on. I want to use swc so that I can switch to importing “.ts” modules instead ...
As you might have gathered from my last article, I’m currently working in the TypeScript world. My experience with converting from CommonJS to ES Modules got me thinking - what is state of the art right now? So I delved in. I want to build a CLI tool using TypeScript and ES Modules but I want to use non-relative roots. What are non-relative roots? Well, if you want to import a module withi...
I haven’t made much progress on my own projects recently because of a project at work. Specifically, I am currently maintaining a CLI tool written in TypeScript about five years ago. It hasn’t really been looked after on a consistent basis, but some of the libraries that it uses (specifically, update-notifier and wait-on) have some security issues. Now, this is a development CLI tool, so the...
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been away from React development for a while, and I’m intending on writing a web application. Thus far, my tech stack is: Base web framework: React Frontend tooling: Vite Hosting: Azure Static Web Apps State management: Redux Toolkit Next up, I want to take a look at UI component libraries. React UI component libraries are collections of ready-...
I’ve been away from React development for a while. I stupidly asked what the best way to create a React app was in 2024 on the React subreddit, and found that reddit is not a friendly or welcoming community. For those wondering, there are three ways of creating a React app - Vite, Remix, and NextJS - but the community suggests Vite. Given the somewhat frosty reception I got on the React subre...
I’m almost ready to take my blog to production and make it public. However, there are a few things that I want to make sure I do before going to production. This is true of any application hosted in the cloud, so it;s a good reminder of things to think about. This post is part of a sequence showing how to deploy a blog on Azure Static Web Apps: Deploying Azure Static Web Apps Configu...
In my last post, I registered a DNS domain name and set up Azure DNS for it. I want my blog to use that domain name, so I need to set up a custom domain using Azure DNS. Of course, nothing is that simple. My blog uses repeatable deployments via Azure Developer CLI, so there is a little bit of extra work to do. This post is part of a sequence showing how to deploy a blog on Azure Static Web...
Today, I’m continuing on the job of setting up this blog. I’ve now got three blog posts, so that’s enough for me to consider what I need to do for production. Probably the most major thing I need to do in the near future is set my blog up on a domain. I don’t have a domain yet, so this post is all about setting up the domain. This post is part of a sequence showing how to deploy a blog on...
For most developers, dealing with the infrastructure part of the job is hard. I like to say “give me a database and a web site” and prefer not to get into the other requirements. My web sites and other cloud projects (including this one) are pretty open. So, what’s the minimum I need to know to deploy stuff on Azure? This post is part of a sequence showing how to deploy a blog on Azure Sta...
If you’ve ever had to rebuild or significantly upgrade your machine in the middle of a project, then you will recognize the pain. You find that some versions of your favorite tools have changed, or you don’t remember the specific build command or tool download location for that one thing you rely on. Dev containers was designed with this in mind. It’s the technology behind Codespaces and sup...