There is a massive amount of change in ASP.NET 5 (for the better), the way we use AppSettings is just one. I’ve been using configinjector (https://github.com/uglybugger/ConfigInjector) for a while now, so thought that this might become redundant with these new changes, but there is still work to be done in my opinion before the framework support is as good.

It uses a json file to store the settings, then a class in C# to load them in too, and you can support multiple files/classes as well, I’m just going to look at an example of one and where they need to do some improvement.

To get it start you need to create a class that will map to the data in the json config file

public class AppSettings
{
public string AdminEmail { get; set; }
public Uri AuthHost { get; set; }
}

The following is the corresponding json file

{

"AppSettings": {
"AdminEmail": "admin@hosted-solutions.com.au",
"AuthHost": "kljkljk"
}
}

Then in startup.cs add the following to load it in for use in DI.

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
// Add Application settings to the services container.
services.Configure<AppSettings>(Configuration.GetSection("AppSettings"));

}

Then it can be used in a controller like this following example

private readonly IOptions<AppSettings> _appSettings;

public AccountController(IOptions<AppSettings> appSettings)

{

_appSettings = appSettings;

}

//
// POST: /Account/Login
[HttpPost]
[AllowAnonymous]
[ValidateAntiForgeryToken]
public async Task<IActionResult> Login(LoginViewModel model, string returnUrl = null)
{

var i =_appSettings.Value.AuthHost;

}

Now the issue with the above is that I have added a value into the config file that is not the correct data type.

The property AuthHost is Uri but the data in the JSON file “kljkljk” is not a Uri type.

If i was using configinjector, it would blow up on Application Startup, but using this configuration in ASP.NET 5 it only errors when its first accessed within the controller, the same issues I have with the current use of AppSettings in the ConfigurationManager with the web config. So if someone makes a typo you don’t know until code starts to run taht actually uses it.

The AWS .NET SDK in my opinion is horrible, and poorly documented. Below is an issue i had that was very hard to trouble shoot so thought i would post about it.

The below code was giving me this exception

System.Net.WebException: The request was aborted: The request was canceled. —> System.IO.IOException: Cannot close stream until all bytes are written. at System.Net.ConnectStream.CloseInternal(Boolean internalCall, Boolean aborting) — End of inner exception stack trace — at System.Net.ConnectStream.CloseInternal(Boolean internalCall, Boolean aborting) at System.Net.ConnectStream.System.Net.ICloseEx.CloseEx(CloseExState closeState) at System.Net.ConnectStream.Dispose(Boolean disposing) at System.IO.Stream.Close() at Amazon.S3.AmazonS3Client.getRequestStreamCallback[T](IAsyncResult result)

using (var client = Amazon.AWSClientFactory.CreateAmazonS3Client(awsAccessKey, awsSecretKey))
 {
 var s3Key = awsEticketFolder + eticketFileName;
 var objReq = new PutObjectRequest();
 objReq.WithInputStream(eticketFileStream);
objReq.WithBucketName(awsBucketName);
 objReq.WithKey(s3Key);
 objReq.WithContentType(mimeType);
 objReq.CannedACL = S3CannedACL.PublicRead;
 objReq.StorageClass = S3StorageClass.Standard;

client.PutObject(objReq);
 }

Was only getting it on large files.

It appears that under the hood, the library is timing out and closing the connection before it was complete hence causing this error.

I have been told however that this might only occur on memorystream objects, and that filestreams might actually get a timeout error, I haven’t verified this though.

The solution?

objReq.WithTimeout(60*60*1000);

Adding a time out to the object of 1 hour allows my big files to upload successfully.

UPDATE: a much better way to approach this is to use swagger, and generate your client code using autorest or swagger codegen you wont be able to use this with WCF, but we moved our WCF services to WebAPI and it worked fine.

A common requirement we have is using the same objects between TypeScript and C#, writing the UI in TypeScript and the business logic and data access in C# in a Web API or WCF.

What I’ve got for this is not a perfect solution by far, we work on a team so need to share the code around, so build time is important, I’m hoping to do some followup posts about how i solved these issues, when i solve them.

We use TypeLite for this (http://type.litesolutions.net/), you can install it via nuget package manager into your C# class library, once in there all you need to do is add the “TsClass” attributes to the classes that you share.

Make sure they are properties and not fields though, fields won’t output into the TypeScript generated code.

[TsClass]
public class MyObject
{
public int ObjectId { get; set; }
public string ObjectName { get; set; }
}

Now the imperfect part of this is in the build, TypeLite uses a tt script to execute, its is possible to run these via msbuild (TeamCity/Teambuild) but they are missing some libraries, so if you do actually get it to run (as i spent half a weekend doing) it’ll blow up on you.

I’m still working on a way to solve this, for now there is one manual step i tell my guys to do before check in, which is right click on the TypeLite script and hit run custom tool

this will regenerate the “ts” file which will be checked in with the project.

Now for the build time pain.

I create a TypeScript Sub-folder in the project and throw in a nuspec file, example code below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2011/08/nuspec.xsd">

<metadata>
<id>Types.TypeScript</id>
<version>0.0.0</version>
<title>Types.TypeScript deployment package</title>
<authors> Pty Ltd</authors>
<owners> Pty Ltd</owners>
<requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>
<description>Types.TypeScript deployment package</description>
<summary>Types.TypeScript deployment package</summary>
<releaseNotes />

<language>en-US</language>
</metadata>
<files>
<file src="*.ts" target="content\Types\$version$" />
</files>
</package>

This then gives me a a nuget package that i push up to our nuget server that we can install into the UI project via nuget package manager. I also package the C# library so end up with two outputs from the one project that can be used in C# or TypeScript.

Currently i put the version number in the path because i was having issues with Visual Studio Version control causing a delete and add on the same file when installing the nuget contents, preventing a check-in on updating the nuget package as the file locks when it is flagged for deletion in source control.

i’m yet to try this with VS2015 or with Git to see if it fixes it. Having the version number in the path means I have to update the path in the project each time so it’s by no means perfect, but it works and we can share it around the team.

Starting from VS 2015 node is built in, along with the task runner explorer, though i still have occasional issues with the task runner explorer, but they are defiantly a must have.

These days in in Visual Studio i normally do a separate project for my static content, this is for a couple of reasons:

1. In my F5 experience means the static content is on a different site, this means that’s is closer to live as i generally send the static content to a CDN
2. The static content is packaged into a single separate package, so i don’t have to pull files out into a separate package for the CDN (personally I use octopack at the moment, which works per vs project)

The gulp file is easy, just throw in a js file with the correct name and it’ll get picked up

I find it easier to work with the uncompressed files locally so throw in a variable to cater for either accessing the live vs local

Dim compress_string As String = ".min"
#If DEBUG Then
 compress_string = ""
#End If

 Dim lk4 As New HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl("script")
 lk4.Attributes.Add("src", StaticLocation & "js/default" & compress_string & ".js")
 lk4.Attributes.Add("language", "javascript")
 lk4.Attributes.Add("type", "text/javascript")
 ThePage.Header.Controls.Add(lk4)

NOTE: Please don’t troll at me for the VB code, just use a converter if you don’t understand or want to be a script kiddy 🙂

you can test it locally by running a build, you’ll want to add some liens into your .tfignore for the “node_modules” folder so it doesn’t pick up the npm files. I also add in a line for *.min.js so it doesn’t check-in my minified content when it builds locally

Below is an example file from one of my projects, im not using contcat on this one because i dont ahve a lot of js in this project, but if you’ve got more than 2 its generally good to concat them as well.

/// <binding AfterBuild='default, clean, scripts, minify' />

// include plug-ins
var gulp = require('gulp');
var concat = require('gulp-concat');
var uglify = require('gulp-uglify');
var del = require('del');
var rename = require('gulp-rename');
var minifyCss = require('gulp-minify-css');

var config = {
 //Include all js files but exclude any min.js files
 src: ['js/**/*.js', '!js/**/*.min.js']
}

//delete the output file(s)
gulp.task('clean', function () {
 del(['js/*.min.js']);
 return del(['css/*.min.css']);
});

//Process javascript files
gulp.task('scripts', function () {
return gulp.src(config.src)
 .pipe(uglify())
 .pipe(rename({
 suffix: '.min'
 }))
 .pipe(gulp.dest('js/'));
});
//process css files
gulp.task('minify', function () {
 gulp.src('./css/*.css')
 .pipe(minifyCss())
 .pipe(rename({
 suffix: '.min'
 }))
 .pipe(gulp.dest('css/'))
 ;
});
//Set a default tasks
gulp.task('default', ['clean'], function () {
 gulp.start('minify', 'scripts');
 // do nothing 
});

This minifies all my css files to a new file named oldfilename.min.css and uglifies all js files to oldfilename.min.js

The Node plugin for teamcity is available here, this will give you npm steps in you build templates.

https://github.com/jonnyzzz/TeamCity.Node

You’ve need to add 2 steps to you project

1. Node.js NPM to install npm modules require

simply the install command will pick up the dependencies and get the files, NOTE: this is add a shitload of time to your builds (upwards of 2 minutes), I’m still looking at ways to solve this.

2. Gulp Step to run the gulp file

Just set the working directory to the root of the project that has the gulp file.

I haven’t tried doing gulp for multiple projects, so far I’ve been primarily using it for js and css, and i generally create one static content project per solution that all the other projects will share. So I can’t comment on this yet.

After that you should have a working solution, as you can see below the issue i have with build times now, 2 min 34 secs downloading to run a job that takes 4 seconds.

If you are using octopack, you will not get the outputed files in the nuget packages, because they aren’t included in the visual studio project file.

I’ve worked around this by adding a nuspec file to my solution. example below from one of my projects, shows including just the minified css and js content to the nuget package for octopus.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2010/07/nuspec.xsd">
<metadata>
<id>StaticContent</id>
<title>StaticContent</title>
<authors>Your name</authors>
<owners>Your name</owners>
<version>0.0.0.0</version>
<licenseUrl>http://yourcompany.com</licenseUrl>
<projectUrl>http://yourcompany.com</projectUrl>
<requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>
<description>StaticContent</description>
</metadata>
<files>
<file src="css\*.min.css" target="css" />
<file src="js\*.min.js" target="js" />
<file src="img\**\*" target="img" />
<file src="Deploy.ps1" target="" />
<file src="Web.config" target="" />
</files>
</package>

Looking at a basic email setup for an Azure hosted app SendGrid offers a free low volume (25k emails a month) solution that is well rounded.

You can easily add a free SendGrid account by using the Azure marketplace to add it to your existing Azure account.

Then once added you can click into it to get your username and password using the “Connection Info” link at the bottom.

Once you’ve got this you can install the SendGrid libraries via Nuget Package manager

PM> Install-Package SendGrid

Below is an example of a method that sends an email with SendGrid, its pretty similar to your standard SMTP mail in the dotnet framework libraries

Public Sub SendAnEmail(mailId As Integer, FromAddress As String _
, ToAddress As String, CCAddress As String _
, BCCAddress As String, Subject As String, Body As String)
' Create the email object first, then add the properties.
Dim myMessage = New SendGridMessage()

' Add the message properties.
myMessage.From = New MailAddress(FromAddress)

' Add multiple addresses to the To field.
Dim recipients As New List(Of [String])() From { _
ToAddress
}

myMessage.AddTo(recipients)
If CCAddress.Length <> 0 Then
myMessage.AddCc(CCAddress)
End If
If BCCAddress.Length <> 0 Then
myMessage.AddBcc(BCCAddress)
End If

myMessage.Subject = Subject
myMessage.DisableClickTracking()
'Add the HTML and Text bodies
myMessage.Html = Body

' Create credentials, specifying your user name and password.
Dim SGUser As String = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("SGUser")
Dim SGPass As String = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("SGPass")
Dim credentials = New NetworkCredential(SGUser, SGPass)

' Create an Web transport for sending email.
Dim transportWeb = New SendGrid.Web(credentials)

' Send the email.
transportWeb.DeliverAsync(myMessage)

End Sub

There is a few other steps i usually do too, you will note in the above method i’ve set the click trough tracking to disabled. This is because i have had issues with it before and the links not working on some odd mail clients.

Also by default SendGrid will “process” your bounces, so you’ll need to login to their dashboard to find them, Most of my users don’t want another dashboard to login to so i normally setup an auto-forward. This can be setup in their interface as per below shot.

If you need to access the bounce history its under the “Suppression” section.

I also recommend setting up the white label

I’ll do another post about setting this up as its not easy, SPF and DKIM are essential to have setup, but can be a pain in the ass to get going, SendGrid does make the processes easier though

I’ve recently implemented a TeamCity build on one of my old projects in TFVC and was surprised about the branching support in TeamCity is focused around Git and Mercurial for branching. So as per usual i coded my way out of a hole, and here’s how i did it.

This is just using a basic example of dev and main branch, but i normally use feature branching for this project too, and version/release branches in some of my other TFVC projects as well.

In TFVC my branches are just basically sub-folders to the solution root, and i put my tfignore at the root as this is outside of the core code imo

In the VCS root, i use the root of the solution, so it includes all branches when it syncs, as TeamCity “syncs” files with source and doesn’t re-download them all the time like TeamBuild, its not an issue when you have a lot of branches, unless you need to do a clean build.

In the build Parameters create a Parameters called Branch Name

Then Create a PowerShell step as the first step on the Build Configuration. Below example code checks the files that were included in the build change and sets the value for the parameter. If you run a build without a check-in it’s not going to have any changes attached to it, so in this case i default it to the dev branch.

$content = [IO.File]::ReadAllText($args[0])
if($content.length -eq 0)
{
Write-Host "No information, defaulting to Dev"
$branch = "dev"
Write-Host "##teamcity[setParameter name='BranchName' value='$branch']"
}
else
{
$branch = $content.Split("/")[0]
Write-Host "##teamcity[setParameter name='BranchName' value='$branch']"
}

This code will only look at the first file in the check-in, because it assumes you wont be checking in to multiple branches at once.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve got the branch name form the file system and can use it in your other steps

In my case i use it in the “OctopusDeploy: Create Release” Step

The end result in octopus looks like the below

In a subsequent post I’ll go into how to setup steps in octopus to prevent the dev branch from getting release to live.