Thoughts from the Wet Coast
The musings of an ASP.NET Developer from Canada's We(s)t Coast

ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM is finally here.  Congratulations to the ASP.NET team for reaching this important milestone earlier this week.  I remember seeing the first prototype of this code at an MVP Summit 3 years ago.  I love the vision of a cross-platform modern server platform for developing web applications.

On this Canada Day 2016 weekend I have time to get back to building my own Blog Application.  In this post I look at a new feature in ASP.NET Core – View Components.  View Components are similar to partial Views but they are much more powerful. 

In my continuing series on building my own Blog Application I next turn to theming.  Any self-respecting Blog Application needs to be able to be themed and this is actually fairly straightforward in ASP.NET Core.  In addition to introducing the theming engine this blog will also introduce the new Configuration and Options frameworks available in ASP.NET Core.

In my continuing series on building my own Blog Application, I next turn to Windows Live Writer (WLW) support.  

I have decided to implement WLW support before I even create a web-based editing experience.  Primarily, this is because building the web-based editing experience is really just a matter of creating a standard MVC Form based UI, while building the WLW support will introduce new concepts.  However, the other reason is that I want Naif.Blog to take WLW support seriously as a first class citizen, so the best way to do that is to do it first – I can have a completely working blog once this is complete.

In my continuing project to build my own Blog Application using the new ASP.NET Core, I previously set the stage by reviewing the development environment, I will be starting with.  In this post I move on to displaying a simple list of Blogs.

I am building my own Blog application using ASP.NET Core, as a means of diving into some of the key new features of the ASP.NET Core Platform.  In this first post I am going to describe the initial state of my application.  This initial state (version 0) is somewhat modified from the basic ASP.NET template, so this first post describes the starting point for my development.

Someone, I think it was Scott Hanselman, once said a few years ago, that if you are a web developer and you blog, then you should create and use your own blog application, so I have decided to do just that.  While I have been using ASP.NET Core for a few months now, I have decided that this will be a good exercise in learning some of the new features of ASP.NET Core, and because I like to blog I will describe what I am doing here in my own blog.

Peter Donker raised the question in the DNN Connect Facebook Group – “How can you access the Client Resource Manager in an MVC View?”.  I gave him the answer as a reply but I thought it would be good to provide a more accessible source for the information.

A few days ago I blogged that I would be creating a number of different “ToDo” modules to showcase “Best Practices” for building DNN modules.  This project is hosted on Github and is inspired by the ToDo MVC project which shows how different JavaScript MV* frameworks and libraries can be used to build a common “ToDo” application.  My first project is a “Classic WebForms” approach to building a DNN ToDo module.

I have called it “Classic Webforms” as it primarily uses features of DNN that were available prior to version 5, when we began to add additional ways to develop modules.  However,  as with most of my example modules this module is developed using a number of modern “Best Practices” – these Best Practices are highlighted in italic.

When I announced that I was no longer working at DNN Corp, I did make it clear that it was still my intention to remain active in the DNN Community.  And so, for the last couple of weeks I have been trying to decide what I should do. 

In my role as Senior Architect and Chief Architect at DNN Corp I often found myself adding or updating the framework for developers to write module extensions for DNN.  And, of course, that meant that I needed to create a module in order to test out those features.  Often I did this by creating a To-do or Task List module.