June, 2012

25th

17 comments

Using NLog to provide custom tracing for your ASP.NET Web API

Cause everything in Web API is pluggable

One of the things I love most about MVC3, and now ASP.NET Web API, is that pretty much any functionality or service that is used by your application, can be replaced with a custom one. One of these is the entire tracing mechanism that Web API uses.

Let’s have a look today at how you can build a simple System.Web.Http.Tracing.ITraceWriter implementation to provide support for a custom logging framework in your Web API – in our case it will be NLog.

More after the jump.

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20th

13 comments

Using controllers from an external assembly in ASP.NET Web API

Because external controllers mean cleaner web application

In general, in my day-to-day job, I am working with large enterprise web applications, where clean projects, noise reduction and test driven development are holy. Therefore I have always been a big fan of placing MVC controllers outside the actual web application project, in a separate class library (or libraries).

With MVC it was very simple, but recently I faced this challenge in Web API, and turns out neither passing the assembly name through MapHttpRoute (not supported) or using something like ControllerBuilder.Current.DefaultNamespaces is not a viable option. So I turned to Henrik Nielsen for advice, and sure enough, he helped immediately. Let’s explore the solution.

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17th

7 comments

Drag and drop files to WPF application and asynchronously upload to ASP.NET Web API

Using the same ApiController you would use for browser based uploads

A while ago, I wrote a post on uploading files to ASP.NET Web API by dragging and dropping them to the browser. Today I will continue with the same topic, but instead, let’s build a WPF application to which you can drag and drop files, and they’ll get uploaded to ASP.NET Web API.

The important thing, is that we will use the *exact* same Web API upload controller as before, meaning the same controller will be handling uploads from the browser and from the client (WPF) application. The client will use the new HttpClient and it’s client-side DelegatingHandlers.

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12th

25 comments

ASP.NET Web API integration testing with in-memory hosting

Because lightweight in-memory server is what the doctor ordered

In-memory hosting is one of the hidden gems of ASP.NET Web API. While the community, forums, bloggers have been buzzing about web-host and self-host capabilities of Web API, aside from the terrific post by Pedro Felix, very little has been said about in memory hosting.

Let me show you an example today, how a lightweight Web API server can be temporarily established in memory (without elevated priviliges, or cannibalizing ports like self host) and used to perform integration testing, allowing you to test almost the entire pipeline, from the request to the response.

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8th

17 comments

Control the execution order of your filters in ASP.NET Web API

Because attributes no longer have to run unordered

One of the few minor annoyances in ASP.NET Web API is that you lack the ability to control the order in which the attributes/filters are executed. If you have several of those applied to one action, they wil not run in the order they have been declared in the code, and that sometimes may cause a lot of problems.

In fact, it has even been submitted as an issue to the ASP.NET team on Codeplex. In the meantime, let’s tackle this problem and see how you can easily regain control over the execution order of the attributes.

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3rd

17 comments

Extending your ASP.NET Web API responses with useful metadata

Because heplpful information make it easier for the client

If you ever worked with any API, which, in this day of age, you must have, you surely noticed that in most situations the API response isn’t just the result (requested data), but also a set of helpful metadata, like “total Results”, “timestamp”, “status” and so on.

In Web API, by default, you just serialize your models (or DTO) and such information are not present. Let’s build something which will solve this problem and help you decorate your response with hepful information. This would make it very easy for the client to implement paging, auto-loading scenarios, caching (if you return last modified information) and a lot more.

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