ASP.NET Core : Add appSettings.json Configuration Files With Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration Library

Now that we have most of our static contents taken care of for our application, meaning we did everything we could without a database.  It's time to create our database.  But before we can do that we need a place to store our connection string to the database.  Usually we just store the connection string in the web.config file in our web application.  However, since ASP.NET Core is trying to break free from the old way of doing things, there's a new way to store configuration information which is more flexible the old web.config way.  As usual it also requires more work.

Enable ASP.NET Core to Serve Static Files

As I have mentioned before ASP.NET Core decouples the application from the infrastructure as much as possible.  Therefore, you have to tell it exactly what you want in your project.  In this blog post we are going to tell ASP.NET that we want to serve static html files in our application.

Here are the steps to serve static files in our ASP.NET Core application.

1.  Open the "NorthwindCafe.Web" project, then click on the "Startup.cs" file in the project.  You will see the following markup in the Configure method

        public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
        {
            app.Run(async (context) =>
            {
                await context.Response.WriteAsync("Hello World!");
            });
        }

2.  Go into the Configure method, remove the existing code and type in the following code

        public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
        {
            app.UseStaticFiles();
        }

ASP.NET Core : Add jQuery, Bootstrap, AngularJS Using bower.json

In this blog post we are going to add the jQuery, AngularJS, and bootstrap libraries to our ASP.NET Core application.  Normally we will use NuGet to bring in these libraries but ASP.NET Core gives you the option to use bower to configure the dependencies that you will need on the client-side.

Here are the steps to import the client-side dependencies into our project:

1. First let's make bower.json part of the "NorthwindCafe.Web" project, click on the "Show All Files" icon in solution explorer, then right click on the bower.json file, and then choose "Show in Solution Explorer"

2.  Open the bower.json file the markup should look like this

{
 "name": "asp.net",
 "private": true,
 "dependencies": {
 }
}

How To Create An ASP.NET Core Application From Scratch

Technology has moved at a breakneck speed, after working with ASP.NET Core for a while, I realized that my ASP.NET MVC blog articles have become outdated.  Don't get me wrong, MVC is still a very big part of ASP.NET Core, but that's the thing it's just a part of it.  ASP.NET Core has decoupled the infrastructure from the application.  You can deploy your web app on Docker imagine that!  No longer is IIS your primary means of hosting your ASP.NET application.

However, with this new freedom comes added complexity.  No longer can you just drag and drop components into your design surface.  Those days are long gone.  This post ist meant to ease your way into ASP.NET Core.  I will using the release candidate version two of ASP.NET Core for this post and other subsequent posts.  Don't be surprise if I update the version midstream because the product is still pre-release.  I will be using Visual Studio 2015 for my development.  You can use the command line interface and notepad to develop your ASP.NET Core application.  But, I think that borders on insanity.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) : Using JSON With JavaScript

JSON is becoming the standard way to exchange data in a relatively short amount of time. The reason is because JSON is easier to work with than XML.

JSON Object:

• JSON object is made up of name/value pairs