Trailhead Interviewed on SSW TV

Recently, Trailhead’s very own Jonathan “J.” Tower was at NDC Sydney, and sat down with Matt Wicks from SSW TV to discuss YARP: Your Gateway to Effortless Project Migrations. During this insightful conversation, J. walks Matt through Microsoft’s reverse proxy, YARP, and how using it and the .NET Upgrade Assistant extension in Visual Studio can […]

Easy Thumbnail Images with Azure Functions and CloudConvert

Have you ever built an application that needed to generate and display thumbnail images? Thumbnail images for any type of image: PNG, JPG, GIF, HEIC, HEIF, SVG… And not just thumbnails for image files but for PDFs, documents, and other random files that users may throw at it? Unless you are building a very custom […]

Migrating Your Legacy ASP.NET Projects to ASP.NET Core Incrementally with YARP

Many C# and .NET developers are grappling with aging ASP.NET projects still running on the .NET Framework. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Many of us have invested heavily in these applications, so the prospect of a full-scale upgrade can seem overwhelming. You might have your eye on moving to ASP.NET Core with its array […]

Exploring What’s New in .NET 8

In the early days of the .NET Framework, releases were infrequent and timed with Windows releases. The shift to an open-source platform brought a welcome change. Now, we anticipate an annual .NET release tied to the .NET Conf event every November. Building on the foundation of .NET 7, this release introduces a host of new […]

Trailhead Interviewed on The Azure DevOps Podcast

In the quickly evolving landscape of software, keeping pace with advancements is crucial to avoid having your application become a dreaded “legacy” application. Recently, Trailhead’s very own Jonathan “J.” Tower had the privilege of being a featured guest on The Azure DevOps Podcast with Jeffrey Palermo. During this insightful conversation, J. and Jeffrey discussed the […]

Slow .NET API? Redis Caching May Be the Answer

Just like venturing into the wilderness requires the proper gear, developing REST APIs with ASP.NET Core also requires the right tools and equipment for your application to perform at its best.  At Trailhead, Redis caching is one such tool that’s always in our backpack. What Is Redis? Redis is an open-source, in-memory data store that […]

SignalR Scaling with Azure SignalR Service

SignalR is the best way to enable real-time communication in modern .NET web applications. So let’s say you have built your first app with SignalR, deployed it to Azure, and everything is working great. After seeing a huge influx of new users, you decide to scale out your App Service to add another instance to […]

Migrate from .NET Framework to .NET 5

.NET 5 has been available for some time now and .NET 6 will be released in late 2021, but perhaps your team is still using .NET Framework 4.7 or 4.8. You may have preferred to stick with what your team knows, or with the time-tested platform that has been around for decades, but .NET 5 […]

Calling APIs with OAuth2 Access Tokens – The Easy Way!

Scenario: Your API needs to call another REST API – or your Console App or Web Job needs to call some other REST API. You can acquire an access token to that API from an OAuth2 Security Token Service such as Duende Identity Server, Okta, Auth0 or Azure Active Directory. This blog shows you how […]

Creating PDF Documents with Razor in ASP.NET Core 2.2 Web API

In this article, I will show you an easy way to create a PDF document and style it properly with Razor engine and the DinkToPdf library. The source code of this project can be found on GitHub. Setting up the project For simplicity, we will create a default Web API project with default options that […]

Breaking change in AspNetCore 2.2 for SignalR and CORS

To get authenticated SignalR hubs to work, you need to allow credentials in CORS, so your aspnetcore code might look like this: services.AddCors(action => action.AddPolicy(policyName, builder => builder .AllowAnyMethod() .AllowAnyHeader() .AllowAnyOrigin() .AllowCredentials())); As of 2.2. you can no longer combine AllowAnyOrigin and AllowCredentials! You will see a warning in the debug output: warn: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Cors.Infrastructure.CorsService[11] The […]

What is .NET Standard & Does it Relate to .NET Core?

When I talk to .NET developers, I find that there’s still a lot of confusion about what .NET Standard is and how it relates to .NET Core. In fact, this weekend I’ll be giving a talk at the Music City Tech conference in Nashville, Tennessee about just that. I thought I’d share some of the […]

AspNetCore – multi tenant tips and tricks

In two recent posts, I blogged about SignalR in .AspNet Core 2.1, and automating boilerplate multitenancy code in Entity Framework Core 2.1. Both these blogs alluded to knowing the identity of the calling user through claims and dependency injection. This blogs ties together those loose ends to show how that can be done. Authenticating the […]

Entity Framework Core 2.1 – Automate all that boring boiler plate!

In any real world enterprise application, you end up writing a lot of similar, tedious boilerplate code for bookkeeping . This logic results in a data model where each table is adorned with a lot of non-domain specific columns – does this look familiar?   There are three common patterns at work here: Auditing – […]

Hello, ASP.NET Core 2.1

UPDATE, 2018 May 30: It’s alive. The dotnet team officially announces 2.1 on their blog! The newest version of ASP.NET Core will be released in just a few days, the team announced this week. They’re targeting Wednesday, May 30, 2018, with an early-access release available already. I’m excited about many of the new features in […]

SignalR as a service in Azure

In a previous post, I wrote about using SignalR in AspNetCore. Today, I tried the next step up – SignalR as a service! You will find the announcement here. This page has more details. So why would you want to run SignalR as a service, rather than embedding your Hubs in your API or Web […]

SignalR in AspNetCore

We’ve all been waiting for the first production release of SignalR for AspNetCore, and supposedly it’s going to be out there any day now. Impatient as I am, I started using 1.0.0-preview2-final – and it rocks!  Here are some tips and tricks, including use of Dependency Injection and handling Multi Tenant scenarios. But first… a […]

A simple, generic Excel file exporter

I recently needed to write a routine that exports a query to an Excel file, and came up with a generic solution I thought might be helpful to share. The code is in an AspNetCore project, but the same principles would work in other .NET scenarios. Let’s start with the signature of the export method: […]

Time to Update that Silverlight Application

A decade ago, Silverlight was king and I loved every minute of it. XAML provided precise and flexible layout, the Silverlight plugin alleviated most browser compatibility issues, MVVM and data binding allowed you to reduce coupling, and WCF RIA Services made it easy to rapidly build data services with corresponding client-side models. But as HTML […]

Is It Time to Update that ASP.NET Web Forms Project?

At Trailhead, we’ve recently been noticing an increase in a couple of questions from our clients. They are: 1. Is Web Forms dead?, and 2. Is ASP.NET still a good framework to use to build a new application? First off, there is some confusion about the difference between ASP.NET and Web Forms. They are not […]

Trailhead + ASP.NET Core 1.0

In this Edition Introducing ASP.NET Core 1.0 Trailhead’s Experience with .NET Core Our ASP.NET Core services: “ASP.NET Core” Online Training  > Consulting Services  > Introducing: ASP.NET Core 1.0 On June 27, Microsoft announced the official release of ASP.NET Core 1.0. Have you missed some of the twists and turns while the project was being developed? No problem, […]