Asp.net Vnext on Strathweb. A free flowing tech monologue.

Overriding filters in ASP.NET MVC 6

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 11:05:48 +0000

There are many posts out there, including on this blog, about what’s in ASP.NET MVC 6 and how to use it. This one however, will be about what’s not in the framework, or at least not in the same way as you might be used to it from MVC 5/Web API 2 - the ability to override filters. I was recently working on an MVC 6 project and ran into this exact problem.

In MVC 5 and Web API 2, there was a built in way to do it, and even though it was not very extensible, it proved to be very handy (at least for me).

IN MVC 6, these override filters are gone, so at first glance, filter overriding is quite difficult. In reality, that’s not the case, you just need to know what to do - let’s have a look.

ASP.NET MVC 6 attribute routing – the [controller] and [action] tokens

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 12:28:29 +0000

When working with attribute routing in Web API 2 or MVC 5 it was relatively easy to get the route to the controller and the controller name out of sync. That was because the route always had to be specified as a string, so whenever you changed the name of the controller you would always have to change the string in the route attribute too.

That could be easily forgotten - especially if you use refactoring tools of Visual Studio or an external refactoring plugin.

This issue has been addressed in MVC6 with a tiny addition - the introduction of [controller] ad [action] tokens into attribute routing.

Razor views pre-compilation with ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 10:36:22 +0000

In previous versions of MVC framework, running on top of the “classic” ASP.NET runtime, it was quite common for developers to switch view compilation on, so that the views get compiled upfront, allowing you to see any errors at compile time, rather than at runtime.

This was done by a simply adding true to your csproj file.

Given that everything changes in the new ASP.NET 5 world, how would you do it now? Let’s explore.

Formatters in ASP.NET MVC 6

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 12:01:30 +0000

One of the key concepts in HTTP API development is the notion of content negotiation (conneg). ASP.NET Web API provided first class support for content negotiation through the use of MediaTypeFormatters.

While MVC 6 is a de facto brand new framework, rebuilt from scratch, the majority of concepts from MVC 5 and Web API 2 have naturally been brought forward, and conneg done through formatters are one of them.

Let’s have a look at formatters in MVC6.

Using ConfigR as a Configuration Source in ASP.NET vNext

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 14:37:09 +0000

One of the cool things about ASP.NET vNext is that it introudces a configuration abstraction, Microsoft.Framework.ConfigurationModel over your application’s configuration.

This is going to replace the old school, limiting approach of forcing you to work with XML configuration only through the System.Configuration classes.

Louis DeJardin has blogged about the ideas behind the isolation of Configuration in his blog post. In the meantime, let’s have a look at how we could enable a ConfigR-based configuration too.

POCO controllers in ASP.NET vNext

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 09:34:38 +0000

One of the very cool features of the vNext of ASP.NET MVC (a unified framework set to succeed MVC, Web API and Web Pages) is the ability use POCO classes as controllers. No base class, no interface to implement, 100% convention.

Let’s look a little bit into that.