React & Web Development

Thanks to StreamContent class, creating basic file download service in ASP.NET Web API is a relatively straightforward task. Let’s start by implementing a basic scenario, where files are served from a directory.
Instead of dealing with file system access directly in controllers I usually like to encapsulate this functionality in a dedicated object, which makes unit testing/mocking easier and makes code tidier. For our examples we will createIFileProvider interface that exposes three operations:

MVC4Bootstrap3Sample is an Asp.NET MVC4 project using Bootstrap3 as its theme. To use it download the project file from my Github repository and open the solution in Visual Studio.NET 2012. This repository's bootstrap3 is not added by using Nuget.

In this blog post I am going to show how to provide Basic HTTP authentication in a Web API project by extending framework’s AuthotrizeAttribute.

ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to create lightweight, HTTP-based APIs for your internet and mobile applications. In most scenarios you will need to provide some kind of authentication and authorization mechanism to restrict and isolate resources exposed by your services. Security in ASP.NET Web API is deferred to the hosting infrastructure. When running within IIS, authorization mechanism runs on top of an existing ASP.NET security system, meaning you can leverage existing features like … good ‘ol membership and role providers.

Why Shouldn't I use MembershipProvider?

Ah the million dollar question: "Why shouldn't I use the MembershipProvider that comes with ASP.NET?" Well I have a quick list here, and you can work around some of these issues by using other providers and writing your own providers, but at that point why not just build your own?

-SQL Server Dependency

-Lots of Useless Tables

-Separation of User and Profile

-Inverted table design (think Dictionary but with SQL, bleech :P).

-Ultimately a generic implementation. Generic is not always good.

-Old Old Old (10+ years); a lot has changed in 10 years.

In today's article we'll have a look at controlling your Spotify client remotely over HTTP using a small API toolset we'll create using self-hosted ASP.NET Web API. On top of that, we'll push current the current player status to the client in real time with SignalR (self-hosted too).

In the process, we will explore several other interesting technologies, such as OWIN, to provide smooth coexistence of Web API and SignalR.

Ember.js is a powerful JavaScript MVC framework to create complex web applications that eliminates boilerplate and provides a standard application architecture, it supports UI Bindings, Composed Views, Web Presentation Layers, and plays nicely with others. In order to create a real-time interaction web application, I add a SignalR hub and REST service with ASP.NET MVC. 

In our sample scenario, we have a Web API service that returns paged list of Posts where a Post is a simple entity with Title, Text and Author. The Web Service fetches data from the repository and serves up 5 pages at a time and stops when there is no more data to fetch.

Some say that to make links nice means to make 100% REST compliant API. Indeed, it’s not true, and REST (was mentioned for the first time in a dissertation of one of the one intelligent fellow), is not as simple as it seems to be. Construction rules for REST-services refer to some limits that also define the architecture, so, you would have to take that into consideration, and either agree or disagree with it.

Bandwidth performance is one of the critical requirements for every website. In today’s time, a major cost of the website is not hard disk space but its bandwidth. So transferring maximum amount of data over the available bandwidth becomes very critical. In this article we will see how we can use IIS compression to increase bandwidth performance.

In modern applications the end users want to get their data. They want it now, they want it up-to date. In fact it does not matter whether these are pure web application, native desktop installations or mobile apps: everybody wants his data now!

For .NET-minded developers there are a numbers of options to implement near-real-time push style communication from the server/the services to the clients/consumers. You can choose plain HTTP or the super-new WebSockets features available in .NET 4.5 together with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. But the coolest and increasingly popular approach is to use a new framework: ASP.NET SignalR.

We will use the jQuery UI Date Picker to provide a nice calendar for picking the dates and as a final twist in the tale, we’ll use a Custom Date format in the Picker. There is a nasty bug in jQuery UI’s date picker, so we’ll see how we can fix that as well using another JavaScript library Moment.js.

There is the old saying: no pain, no gain. Well congratulations reader, my pain is your gain in this week's post. I will be showing you the steps it takes to purchase, sign, and install a SSL certificate on Windows Azure. I am a big fan and customer of DNSimple, which is a domain hosting provider. If you aren't using them, then you will need to figure out the initial steps for your hosting provider.

About a week ago, I set out to add authentication to an API for a small project I was working on. I didn't need the complexity of something like OAuth and for an API, Forms Authentication doesn't make much sense. I figured the easiest would be to just enable Basic Authentication in IIS and I'd be on my way. Well, the first problem with using Basic Authentication as it comes in IIS is that it only connects to Windows accounts, which in my case wouldn't work; I needed to authenticate against a database.

OWIN stands for Open Web Interface for .NET. Now if you are thinking, .NET already has ASP.NET and MVC and Web API, how does this OWIN thing fit in? Is it a new tool/library/web framework, and then what is Katana?

Well OWIN is an open, industry standard or a specification and is primarily authored by two members of the ASP.NET Team - Benjamin Vanderveen and Louis Dejardin. You can compare OWIN with RACK in Ruby and WSGI from the Python world. For now let’s call it as a specification of interoperability between webhosts and frameworks, that outlines ‘some’ rules for building ‘certain’ types of .NET applications.

The Katana project by Microsoft picks up these rules and has created an implementation of the specification. So OWIN is like the blueprint whereas the Katana project uses the blueprint to create increasingly useful set of modules that adhere to the OWIN rules. Don’t worry about what those Modules do, we’ll see that soon, for now, imprint this much, OWIN is a blueprint and Katana in as implementation.

SignalR started off as an OSS side project by Damien Edwards and David Fowler at Microsoft but soon it snowballed into a popular abstraction for persistent connections in .NET. With the release of Visual Studio Web Update 2012.2, SignalR was formally rolled into a part of ASP.NET and is now an open source component that is fully supported by Microsoft.In the past, we have explored interesting ways to use SignalR here on DotNetCurry. Our first SignalR post demonstrated how to use SignalR with the excellent Diff-Patch-Match library by Neil Fraser and build a collaborative ‘Review’ functionality where two people or more people can review the same post and view changes made by each other, in real time.With the release of Windows 8 and Office 2013 came One Note that had similar real-time ‘review’ functionality.

When a user accesses an ASP.NET site using Forms Authentication, ASP.NET generates a cookie that stipulates the user is authenticated. The browser will continue to send that cookie on every subsequent request to the site, no matter from where that request originates. This opens your site to CSRF attacks, as does any authentication scheme where the browser automatically sends authentication information previously received. If, after your site provides the browser with the security cookie, the user visits some malicious site, then that site can send requests to your service, piggy-backing on the authentication cookie the browser received earlier.

In this post we are going to learn how we can easily create PDF from ASP.Net application with the help of Razor PDF NuGet package.

This NuGet package is created by Al Nyveldt It internally uses ITextSharp an open source PDF convertor library. RazorPDF uses Razor View engine to create iTextXML which is in tern used to produce PDF file. You can get more information about that at below link.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/RazorPDF