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

I have been working with Angular in my day job for a couple of years, starting with the initial betas of Angular 2, so when I decided to create a new personal APS.NET Core application, I decided I wanted the latest Angular 6 CLI support, together with the server side Angular support that Microsoft has added to ASP.NET Core in recent releases.

In an earlier post in this series I blogged about creating themes for my blogs. In my most recent updates I have added support for pages to my blog. All the pages on the site are rendered with the same View Page view, so would therefore use the same layout or “template”. Even in a fairly simple site this quite restrictive, and in the post I will show how you can support multiple different layout pages or page templates.

In a previous post, I introduced the concept of Tag Helpers in ASP.NET Core. In this post I will show how you can create your own Tag Helper. As an example I will rewrite my User Profile ViewComponent as a Tag Helper. As I mentioned in the previous post I can use the User Profile View Component as a Tag Helper by using the built-in ViewComponent Tag Helper, but this exercise will show how we can build it as a pure Tag Helper.

I have been making some updates to my Blog Application (Naif.Blog) over the last few weeks, as I both enhance the application with some new features and bring it up to the latest version of ASP.NET Core (v2.1). In my implementation of theming I have allowed themes to “override” any of the default Views. This makes the theming engine very powerful but it also makes it potentially harder for theme creators as they would need to understand some basic Razor. This is where Tag Helpers come in - Tag Helpers provide a way to express functionality in HTML markup. In this blog I review the built-in Tag Helpers.

I have been updating my Naif.Blog application to ASP.NET Core 2.1, and I noticed that when the site is published all the Razor cshtml files are “pre-compiled” into an assembly. This made me think - this could allow me to break the application into separate projects and I could deploy assemblies with embedded UI, thus allowing me to modularize the application. So I took a deeper look and realized that the ASP.NET Razor team have already thought about this and included a new Razor Class Library (RCL) feature into the 2.1 release.

Its just over a year since I updated my Naif.Blog blogging application. In fact its just over a year since I posted anything on this blog. For the last week I have been off work and so I have been keeping my hand in by making some long overdue updates to my blogging application – Naif.Blog.

Just over a year ago when I started creating my own Blogging web application I stated that one of the goals of this exercise was to remove my dependency on an expensive SQL Server database.  I am pleased to announce that I have accomplished my goal - You are reading this post on my re-launched personal blog site running on my new blog app - Naif.Blog on Microsoft Azure.

Last weekend was another long weekend in Canada - at least in the part of Canada where I live, British Columbia, so I had some time to return to working on my bog application - Naif.Blog.  The final piece of the puzzle - how can we make our simple blog application support multiple different blogs from the same code-base.  This feature can save hosting dollars as it allows a single hosted site to support many different blogs, and is usually termed - multi-tenancy.

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.