Tag Archives: Web API

My Video Course : Learning ASP.NET Web API

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Hello All,

9781785885945I am very happy to announce that my video course  Learning ASP.NET Web API using ASP.NET Core 1.0 got published. This course is for all the ASP.NET Developers who have little or no experience to Web API as it starts from basics and covers all the key aspects of Rest-ful services with real world examples. It will be similarly helpful to experienced Web API devs because developing it using ASP.NET Core is completely different and many old concepts cannot be used as it is.

The vision of the course is that the viewers understand that how to develop a RESTful web API using the ASP.NET Web API service, and be able to implement a service with a range of data transfer and handling operations. They will understand RESTful service architectures and how different types of application data can be exposed with a web API, to different client endpoints.Let me give overview of the course.

The key features of the course are

  • Develop a complete enterprise level REST based HTTP services from scratch using ASP.NET Core Web API with latest standards.
  • An example driven course from starting from basics of REST with brief description of new ASP.NET framework ASP.NET Core.
  •  Discusses all the building blocks: Routing, Controllers, Content Negotiations and security with advance topics like versioning, dependency Injection, caching etc.
  • Includes the tips and best practices for making robust and scalable APIs.
  • Full of pictorial presentations for core concepts, practical examples and clear step by step instructions with tips and best practices.

What you will learn from this course.

  • Understand REST basics and its constraints with real life examples.
  • ASP.NET Core framework changes and its impact of ASP.NET Web API.
  • Building blocks of ASP.NET Web API : Routing Controllers, HTTP verbs with scenario bases example.
  • Implement various data transfer operation and Content negotiation.
  • Various security implementations options including OAuth, CORS.
  • A good hand holding of Advance topics like dependency Injection, API versioning, HTTP Caching etc.
  • Consuming Web API end points using a real world client.
  • Tips and best practices of writing better, highly scalable and performant Web API service.

To find more about the video course and watch the sample video Click here.

Thanks a lot to all of you for your continuous support and feedback. Thanks a lot to Packt publishing for providing me the opportunity for this course and being supportive throughout the journey. Thanks a lot to my friends specially Arun for his time, support, feedback and reviews. Also I cannot forget to thanks my wife Renu for being so supportive and taking care of my son Anvit during my late night hours and weekends. Without their support it would not have been possible.

This book is based on my personal learning via blogs, samples, white papers, projects, POCs and many other sources. It has no relations with any of my current and previous employers. As this course is built on ASP.NET Core 1.0 which is not yet completely out and you may expect some changes in the final version. If you find any mistakes or have some constructive feedback, you can share it with me on my mail id – brij.mishra@outlook.com  I will try my best to address that at earliest.

Again, thanks a lot to all of you for your support and feedback. I am sure you will find it useful and will be very happy to see your valuable feedback and comments.

Cheers,
Brij

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ASP.NET 5 RC1 Web API always returns JSON – Why ?

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Hello All,

Note – For this example, I am have used Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 for IDE and ASP.NET 5 RC1.

Recently I started working on an ASP.NET Web API application but I got stuck at one point for few hours. Let’s start from scratch and create the application first then we will see the behavior and various options. As I (most of us) like to start from clean slate so I created an empty ASP.NET application and followed the below stuff

  1. Added Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc as dependency in project.json.
  2. In ConfigureServices method of startup.cs, added services.AddMvc()
  3. In Configure method of startup.cs, added app.UseMvc();
  4. Added a Controllers folder in solution and added a controller class with name as PeopleController which inherits from Controller.
  5. Added the attribute route on the controller as
  6. Now we have done all the necessary set up and added a Controller for Web API. I have added a DataHelper class in Models folder (which I added) which returns a list of persons.

Now when I run that application and call the API using Fiddler as

request

I get the response in JSON format

response

Although we didn’t send any Accept header in request. It means now the default response format is JSON only. Now I added the Accept header as

acceptrequest

Then also the response was same as earlier.

As per earlier understanding that the returned content type should be as per the Accept header which is not the case when I did some research, I found that now by default only JSON formatter is included. Refer the below link for detailed discussion.

https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/issues/1765

And this was implemented in beta 3 release and it says that to add the XML formatter, we need to include the package Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Xml but I got an error while including this package because the latest version available is beta5 and the version of MVC we are using is rc1. After spending few hours, I discovered that the package Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Xml is not the correct one now and there was no update in it since 30th Jun’15. Two new packages for formatting XML and JSON format got introduced as

  1. Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Formatters.Xml
  2. Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Formatters.Json

Currently there is no details available on earlier package  that now some new packages are available instead of Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Xml  which made it bit tough to find the right one.

As we realized, JSON is included by default with MVC package, I added Xml package and configureed it in services as

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    var mvcBuilder = services.AddMvc();
    mvcBuilder.AddXmlDataContractSerializerFormatters();
}

Now when I ran the package with Accept header as text/xml, it return the response in XML format as

xmlresponse

But default is JSON only so we don’t need to send any information in header if we just want the result in JSON format.

Cheers
Brij

 

OutputCache doesn’t work with Web API – Why? A solution

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Output Cache is one of the most useful features of ASP.NET and plays a key role for making high performance web applications. It’s very easy to use this feature. Just put OutputCache attribute on any controller/action or you can set outputCacheSettings attribute in web.config. ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API are two technologies that looks very similar when we work with them. They have similar concepts like Controller, Action, routing etc and work almost in similar way except one returns View and returns data in JSON/XML format.

Recently in an application, I was required to cache some web api calls so I put the OutputCache attribute over the Web API action but when I ran it was not working. The data was not getting cached and on every request, it was going to server and further fetching data from database and returning the same. Then to verify the attribute, I put the same attribute over a MVC action and it was working like a charm. So I felt that it looks like that this attribute is not working. Continue reading →