gill – snowball.be

Embarking on a new adventure: Xpirit Belgium

5 November 20185 November 2018
by gill

As from today, I’m starting a new chapter in my career. Together with Pieter Gheysens, we are starting Xpirit Belgium, a new IT Consulting & Training company which will focus on becoming a trusted adviser of companies wanting to solve their IT problems in DevOps, Cloud Architecture, Mobile Development and Cloud Powered Intelligence. Xpirit Belgium will be an independent company, partnering with Xpirit in the Netherlands (https://xpirit.nl) which has built a remarkable brand in the last couple of years with an exceptional team of various technology experts, deeply engaged in the Microsoft community. Xpirit has been awarded Microsoft DevOps Partner of 2018.

With the official start of Xpirit Belgium, I’m proud for being part of a highly motivated international team which shares the passion for technology and knowledge transfer.

In the next couple of months, all new business will need to be initiated via Xpirit Belgium and I will be happy to assist you as a trusted adviser for solving your current and future issues on topics including DevOps , Cloud Architecture, Mobile Development and Cloud Powered Intelligence. I’m confident that our solid team of true experts are ready for this new adventure.

Gill Cleeren – CTO Xpirit Belgium

Xamarin

Slides of my Xamarin Enterprise applications with MVVM webinar

25 January 2018
by gill

As promised during the webinar, you can download the slides here: Xamarin – MVVM – Microservices

General

Slides and demos for my talk at IT DevConnections…

25 October 201725 October 2017
by gill

More talks, more slides… The last weeks have been exhausting in terms of presentations I’ve been doing. But I love doing it, so that justifies the many hours I spend on creating them.

I was invited to talk at IT DevConnections in San Francisco in October 2017. Really nice city, love it. Although the heat was really a bit too much for a Belgian in October. For the next time, a little colder is something to work on!

Anyway, here are the slides and demos for the talks I’ve given at the conference:

Mobile DevOps with Xamarin
- Slides
Xamarin and MVVM
- Slides
- Demos
Building a REST API with ASP.NET Core
- Slides

Hope you enjoyed the talks!

General

Slides and demos for my talks at .NET Developer…

19 October 201725 October 2017
by gill

I was selected as speaker for .NET Developer Days 2017 in Warsaw, Poland. As promised during the different talks, here are the slides for the sessions I gave:

Building your first Xamarin.Android app in 60 minutes
- Slides
- Demos
Practical Xamarin.Forms
- Slides
- Demos
Xamarin and MVVM/MVVMCross
- Slides
- Demos

Thanks for joining, I hope you enjoyed the talks and have learned a lot!

Conferences

Slides of my Advanced Xamarin.Forms talk at TechDays NL

12 October 201712 October 2017
by gill

My second session at TechDays NL is titled “Advanced Xamarin.Forms”. In this talk, I’ve shown concepts such localization, custom renderers, effects, SkiSharp and much more. Take a look at the slides and demos below if you want to learn more!

Slides

Demos

Thanks for joining the session, I hope you enjoyed it!

Conferences

Slides of my Xamarin, MVVM, Docker and Microservices architecture…

12 October 2017
by gill

At TechDays Netherlands 2017, I’ve done 3 talks. Here are the slides for the “Building an enterprise application with Xamarin.Forms, MVVM, Docker and Microservices” talk!

Slides

Demo

Thanks for coming by!

Conferences

Slides and demos of my Basta 2017 talks

27 September 201727 September 2017
by gill

On September 27th 2017, I’ve given 2 talks at my first ever visit to the now 20 year old Basta conference in Germany. It’s a nice and well-organised conference and I’m grateful that I was selected for 2 talks there.

The 2 Xamarin talks were well attended, thanks for joining. As promised, you can find the content of the sessions below.

Practical Xamarin.Forms:
- Slides
- Demos
Mobile DevOps with Xamarin
- Slides

General

Updating a real-life ASP.NET Core 1.1 project to ASP.NET…

21 September 201721 September 2017
by gill

With the rapid releases of .NET Core, it’s hard to keep up. I’ve just had the same problem hitting me again, where I have JUST released a new Pluralsight course (read more about it here). This course is based on ASP.NET Core 1.1 MVC and yes, creating such a course takes time. A lot of time, considering it’s a course of almost 7 hours of deep-dive content. After it was handed over to production late July 2017, Microsoft actually has already released another update to ASP.NET Core, namely ASP.NET Core 2.0. This update isn’t as breaking as the update from 1.0 to 1.1 was earlier this year, however, some things changed a little bit and some things got a little simpler.

For the purpose of this Pluralsight course, I have outlined the changes below that you can follow to convert the sample application (Bethany’s Pie Shop) to ASP.NET Core MVC 2.0. Note that there’s no real need to upgrade! ASP.NET Core 1.1 has an LTS (Long-term service) release that you can keep using without a problem. However, if you want to use the latest version of the .NET Core framework, make the following small changes and you’re on your way. All other code and all other content in the course stays exactly the same!

The updated code can be downloaded from GitHub.

The *.csproj file

The *.csproj file was already simplified with ASP.NET Core 1.1, now it’s even simpler. Microsoft added a new metapackage called Microsoft.AspNetCore.All which references *A LOT* of other packages by default. Therefore, when following along with the Pluralsight course, everywhere where I say: “Add this package reference in the csproj file”, you can basically omit this. Adding the reference (if you’re using the 2.0 version that is) won’t do any harm but it’s really not necessary.

Here’s the updated csproj file. Note that I made some other changes here as well, the most important one is of course that you now are using netcoreapp2.0.

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<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">

<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.0</TargetFramework>
</PropertyGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<None Update="wwwroot\**\*">
<CopyToPublishDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToPublishDirectory>
</None>
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.All" Version="2.0.0" />

<PackageReference Include="Serilog" Version="2.5.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Serilog.Extensions.Logging" Version="2.0.2" />
<PackageReference Include="Serilog.Sinks.RollingFile" Version="3.3.0" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<DotNetCliToolReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools.DotNet" Version="1.0.0" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<Folder Include="Areas\Promo\Models" />
<Folder Include="Views\Shared\Components\SystemStatusPage" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<WCFMetadata Include="Connected Services" />
</ItemGroup>

</Project>

Note that you’ll need to update both the csproj file of the ASP.NET Core MVC project as well as the unit test project. Below you can find the csproj for the unit test project.

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<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.0</TargetFramework>
<IsPackable>false</IsPackable>
</PropertyGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk" Version="15.3.0-preview-20170628-02" />
<PackageReference Include="Moq" Version="4.7.99" />
<PackageReference Include="xunit" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="xunit.runner.visualstudio" Version="2.2.0" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<ProjectReference Include="..\src\BethanysPieShop\BethanysPieShop.csproj" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
<Service Include="{82a7f48d-3b50-4b1e-b82e-3ada8210c358}" />
</ItemGroup>

</Project>

After you’ve made the changes to the csproj files, save them and perform a clean and rebuild. You may also need to remove the bin and obj directories manually as they may contain some lingering references to .NET Core 1.1 stuff.

API Changes

Next to the csproj files, ASP.NET Core 2.0 MVC does have some API changes on-board. You can read about them here.

When compiling at this point, you’ll get some errors, all of them are easy to fix </phew>.

IdentityUser has changed slightly. There’s now a generic and non-generic version. In the application, we’re using the non-generic one (the “old” one), so this requires that we make a change basically everywhere IdentityUser is being used. For example, the ApplicationUser class need a new using statement.

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using System;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.EntityFrameworkCore;

namespace BethanysPieShop.Auth
{
public class ApplicationUser : IdentityUser
{
public DateTime Birthdate { get; set; }
public string City { get; set; }
public string Country { get; set; }
}
}

IdentityRole has also changed (same as IdentityUser), so also wherever we are using IdentityRole, you’ll need to include the using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity; statement.

Third-party authentication with Google (and other providers) has also changed. Previously, we were using the following code in the Startup > Configure method.

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app.UseGoogleAuthentication(new GoogleOptions
{
ClientId = "KEY-apps.googleusercontent.com",
ClientSecret = "SECRET"
});

Remove this block entirely. In the Configure method, also replace app.UseIdentity(); with app.UseAuthentication();.

Next, in the ConfigureServices, we now need to add the third-party authentication. Add the following code in the ConfigureServices method.

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services.AddAuthentication()
.AddGoogle(options =>
{
options.ClientId = "KEY.apps.googleusercontent.com";
options.ClientSecret = "SECRET";
});

Next, you’ll also see an error on the ModelBindingMessageProvider, which I use to translate error messages. The used property is now get only, so we now need to use a method to change the value, as follows.

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.AddMvcOptions(options =>;
{
options.ModelBindingMessageProvider.SetValueIsInvalidAccessor(s => $"You can't leave this {s} empty");
}

Claims have changed a little bit as well. Previously, the IdentityUser class had a Claims property, which I used to store the user claims. That’s gone, so according to Microsoft, we now need to add it ourselves. OK, pretty easy. Go to the ApplicationUser again and add the Claims with the type parameter you’ll want to use.

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public class ApplicationUser : IdentityUser
{
public DateTime Birthdate { get; set; }
public string City { get; set; }
public string Country { get; set; }

///

/// Navigation property for the claims this user possesses.
///

public virtual ICollection<IdentityUserClaim>; Claims { get; } = new List<IdentityUserClaim>();
}

We’ll want to persist these to the database as well, right? To do this, go to your AppDbContext and add the following configuration.

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protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder builder)
{
base.OnModelCreating(builder);
builder.Entity<Pie>()
.HasOne(p => p.RecipeInformation)
.WithOne(i => i.Pie)
.HasForeignKey<RecipeInformation>(b => b.PieId);

builder.Entity<ApplicationUser>()
.HasMany(e => e.Claims)
.WithOne()
.HasForeignKey(e => e.UserId)
.IsRequired()
.OnDelete(DeleteBehavior.Cascade);
}

Note that if you have already built the database using a migration, things will keep running fine.

Finally, we also need to make a small change in the login.cshtml. GetExternalAuthenticationSchemes doesn’t exist anymore and has been replaced with GetExternalAuthenticationSchemesAsync. Update the code as follows.

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<h4>Or use another service to log in!</h4>
@{
var loginProviders = (await SignInManager.GetExternalAuthenticationSchemesAsync()).ToList();
if (loginProviders.Count == 0)
{
<div>

There are no external authentication services configured. See <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=532715">this article</a>
for details on setting up this ASP.NET application to support logging in via external services.

</div>
}
else
{

<a class="btn btn-info">
Google
</a>

@*

<form class="form-horizontal" method="post">
<div>

@foreach (var provider in loginProviders)
{
<button class="btn btn-default" title="Log in using your @provider.DisplayName account" name="provider" type="submit" value="@provider.AuthenticationScheme">@provider.AuthenticationScheme</button>
}

</div>
</form>*@
}
}

Voila! You should now have an ASP.NET Core 2.0 version of Bethany’s Pie Shop!

Pluralsight

New Pluralsight course published: Building an Enterprise Application with…

20 September 2017
by gill

I’m happy to announce that my 12th Pluralsight course just went live, right in the week of the Pluralsight Live event 🙂

In this course, you will explore a fully-working web application and you will learn how you can scale it up from its current, rather basic state to a state-of-the-art, enterprise application. You will learn how you can add and manage users and roles and improve on the site’s security. You’ll see how the new additions to the ASP.NET Core MVC platform such as tag helpers and view components can be put to real use. A robust enterprise application also requires that we have a decent amount of unit tests ready, this course will show you how you can write tests for the different layers within the application. Finally, you’ll learn how you can improve the developer experience using diagnostics and automated deployments to Azure.
After watching this course, you’ll be ready to create real-world enterprise applications with ASP.NET Core MVC.

Want to learn how a real enterprise application is build using the latest and greatest of ASP.NET Core? Head over to the course page on Pluralsight and start watching! (Note, it’s a 7 hour course, so take your time to go through all the material!)

General

And I’m back to blogging

12 September 201720 September 2017
by gill

After some years, I’m back to blogging. A new site, a new blog… and a lot of other new changes which are longtime overdue.

So sit back, enjoy and bookmark the new blog for (hopefully) some informative posts in the coming time!

Author: gill

The *.csproj file

API Changes