Presenting in the conference

During the past couple of years I was actively involved in several meetups and local events mostly as attendee but some times as speaker or organizer as well. In general I think this is one of the best ways to get to know really smart people and find out about the trends in the extremely fast moving software development world.

Introduction

This is the first of the two parts about using webpack and the corresponding nuget package I created, in an asp.net 5 application.
This part acts as an introduction to the reasons behind the need for an alternative approach of static asset management and JavaScript module bundling in an asp.net 5 application.
Besides that includes a brief explanation of an example Reactjs application that uses the webpack nuget package. In the second part we will explore the internals of the nuget package itself and dig into webpack’s details.

VS Code

Vs code is one of the new players in the area of editors and has done some really good progres so far on catching up with the competition. It is a lightweight editor which currently supports mulitple langueges and on top of that it’s multiplatform. It includes already some great features and more are coming in the near future. Personally I am using it more and more both for front and back end development.

Why Webpack

Webpack is one of the solutions that are available out there and solves JavaScript reference modules problem. It’s also my favourite tool to use it in the Reactjs project I am involved lately. Webpack provides wider functionality except just referencing external JavaScript code but this is not the scope of this blog spot. In this post I will try to concentrate in a feature of the tool that most examples don’t use it and it’s very important according to my opinion. This is the resolve section of Webpack configuration and how it can help us in day to day development.

Why I was absent

It is a long time from my last post but so much have happened during this time period. Initially I was involved in the organization of local Global Azure Bootcamp in Thessaloniki. It was our first attempt to organize an one day event and we are very satisfied by the result. It is an amazing feeling to be part of a global community for one day. Right after Azure Bootcamp, Microsoft’s biggest development conference took place in San Fransisco. At Build tons of new features were announced and I am still straggling to watch all the interesting videos on Channel 9. Lastly I attended the first international development conference that was organized in the city I am living, in Thessaloniki. Devit took place on Friday 15th of May and it was very successful and amazingly well organized conference.

ASP.NET vNext

asp.net vNext is the next version of the well know web stack framework and I won’t describe it at all as it’s quite easy to find details about it. It’s not yet production ready but that point comes really close. I am very interested on this new web stack and the direction it gets so I am playing with it when the time permits. Among the other changes the core team has done, they also changed the way the client side package management is done. The framework adopts well known practices on the field and adds to the core system tools like npm and bower package managers and gulp and grunt tasks runners. For the people that are not familiar with basic nodejs development and client side package management they should spend some time and study those as it’s part of the next version of asp.net. An excellent place to start the reading is the newly added official documentation site of asp.net vNext.

About React

React is a JavaScript library that allows us to build modern and complex web interfaces. It’s becoming more and more popular and there is a huge buzz around it. The last is absolutely normal as Facebook is the creator of the library and they have heavily invested on it. They even have developed some architecture guidelines on how to build a React application which is called Flux. Lately I am involved in a project that we are using these tools and I have to say it is really fun as it is a fresh technology and certainly changes the way I was used to develop web applications. Lastly React is one of the best libraries out there to develop what is called an Isomorphic JavaScript application. I won’t explain more why isomorphic looks like a safe choice for the future of the web as this is not the goal of the post.

node.js and Visual Studio

node.js is a very popular platform which allows having Javacript executed on the server. This is what everybody reads when navigating on the official site:
Node.js® is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

OWIN and project Katana

OWIN (Open Web Iterface for .NET) is the new way of developing web applications in the .NET ecosystem. It is a great approach as it offers the flexibility of decoupling the application from the hosting environment itself. This means that as long as we develop a Web application on top of OWIN then we can easily host it outside the standard hosting environment so far which is IIS. A quick example is that by using a specific [nuget package] selfhost. As OWIN is just a specification then we need an implementation of this in each platform we want to support. The implementation for Microsoft’s platform is called Katana.

During last weekend I had the opportunity to attend ItProDevConnection for third time and second time in a row as public speaker. I have to say it was an amazing experience, I so enjoyed myself being part of a huge tech community. I met so many interesting people among else and heard about latest trends in development.

Connection with previous posts

This is the last post of the series of how we can use Entity Framework Code First to create a multitenant application. You are requested first to read Part 1 where there is an introduction in the problem we are trying to solve and some infrastructure code required to continue. Part 2 describes the query filtering that is happening automatically in the entire application. In this post I am going to show how we can use the CommandTree interceptor in order to modify the insert, update and delete commands. The idea of implement something like this came to my mind after watching Rowan Miller’s excellent session in North America TechEd, which I highly recommend you to watch.