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NetLearnerApp

NetLearner: The Internet Resource Learning Helper built with ASP .NET Core

NetLearner is an ASP .NET Core web app to allow any user to consolidate multiple learning resources all under one umbrella. The codebase itself is a way for new/existing .NET developers to learn ASP .NET Core, while a deployed instance of NetLearner can be used as a curated link-sharing web application.

In 2020, a new A-Z weekly blog series covered 26 different topics from January through June 2020.

Take a look at the 2020 A-Z series.

To revisit the older series, you may also refer to the 2019 A-Z series.

Restrictions

Registration for each web app has been disabled by default. To enable registration, please do the following:

Locate scaffolded Identity pages under /Areas/Identity/Pages/Account/
In Register.cshtml, update the tag to include environments in addition to Development, if desired.
In Register.cshtml.cs, replace [Authorize] with [AllowAnonymous] to allow access to registration

Architecture

The current version of NetLearner on Github includes a shared .NET Standard Class Library, used by multiple web app projects. The web apps include:

MVC: familiar to most ASP .NET developers
Razor Pages: relatively new in ASP .NET
Blazor: the latest offering from ASP .NET

Future updates will also include:

Web API, exposed for use by other consumers
JavaScript front-end web app(s)

Note that an ASP .NET Core web app can contain various combinations of all of the above. However, the purpose of the NetLearner application code is to demonstrate how to achieve similar results using all of the above. So, each of the web app projects will be developed in parallel, using a shared library.

Shared Library

The shared library is a .NET Standard 2.1 library. This version was selected because .NET Core 3.x supports .NET Standard 2.1, as seen in the official documentation.

.NET Standard: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/net-standard

The shared library contains the following:

Database Context: for use by Entity Framework Core
Migrations: for EF Core to manage the (SQL Server) db
Models: db entities, used by web apps
Services: service classes to handle CRUD operations

Using terms from Clean Architecture references, you may think of the DB Context and Migrations as part of the Infrastructure code, while the Models and Services are part of the Core code. For simplicity, these are all kept in a single library. In your own application, you may split them up into separate assemblies named Core and Infrastructure.

Running the Application

In order to run the web app samples, clone the following repository:

NetLearner: https://github.com/shahedc/NetLearnerApp

Here, you will find at least 4 projects:

NetLearner.SharedLib: shared library project
NetLearner.Blazor: Blazor server-side web project
NetLearner.Mvc: MVC web project
NetLearner.Pages: Razor Pages web project

To create a local copy of the database:

Open the solution file in Visual Studio 2019
In the Package Manager Console panel, change the Default Project to “NetLearner.SharedLib” to ensure that EF Core commands are run against the correct project
In the Package Manager console, run the Update-Database command
Verify that there are no errors upon database creation

To run the samples from Visual Studio 2019: