Releasing SocialGoal - Reference Web App for ASP.NET MVC 5, EF 6 Code First, AutoMapper, Autofac, TDD and DDD

Friday, January 24, 2014

My team at Marlabs, developed and released a sample reference web app for the Microsoft ASP.NET stack, named “SocialGoal” . SocialGoal is a social networking web app for socializing your goals and strategies with people. People can create goals and can be shared across the network of SocialGoal users. This app is built with ASP.NET MVC 5, EF 6 Code First, AutoMapper, Autofac, Twitter Bootstrap and following Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Domain Driven Design (DDD). The first drop of the application is available on github at https://github.com/MarlabsInc/SocialGoal. A release note is available in the docs folder of the project repository. The primary objective of the SocialGoal app is to provide a learning app for building real-world web apps with ASP.NET MVC 5 and EF 6 Code First.

The app is built with following technologies:

ASP.NET MVC 5
EF 6 Code First
AutoMapper
Autofac
Twitter Bootstrap
NUnit
Moq

46 Comments

Thanks for providing a full-fledged web app.

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Magoffin - Monday, January 27, 2014 12:20:07 PM

Thanks shiju. Very happy to see the app as open source.

Razack - Tuesday, January 28, 2014 12:06:46 PM

Can you tell me what is the reason to create UoW in this project? Tests are very very brittle. And you pass strings as filters and then you switch case on them!?

Piotr Perak - Wednesday, January 29, 2014 3:42:26 AM

@brittle - The primary objective of the app is to provide a learning app for building apps with ASP.NET MVC and EF Code First, which would be better than a normal CRUD demo.In this project, there is no explicit need for Unit of Work, but you can use this Unit of Work for managing transactions, where you would be leveraging multiple repositories for performing a transaction from the service layer.

shiju - Wednesday, January 29, 2014 3:14:00 PM

Superb stuff. Regards!

Darley - Thursday, January 30, 2014 4:42:12 PM

For learning purpose, this is a brilliant application.

Ben - Thursday, January 30, 2014 6:56:07 PM

Good learning to unit testing and mocking.

Alexis - Thursday, January 30, 2014 6:58:30 PM

You have made your point very effectively..

Deitz - Thursday, January 30, 2014 7:01:11 PM

We don't need blog posts with traditional hello world apps, but we need this kind of demo apps.

aspcoder - Thursday, January 30, 2014 7:01:23 PM

Nicely put, Appreciate it!

Chung - Thursday, January 30, 2014 11:55:44 PM

Valuable information. Lucky me I discovered your site accidentally, and I'm shocked why this
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Hopetoun - Friday, January 31, 2014 12:18:55 AM

Thanks a lot, Quite a lot of info!

Akhtar - Friday, January 31, 2014 1:47:18 AM

Thanks a lot, I enjoy it.

Gandy - Friday, January 31, 2014 2:15:29 AM

Great job! Did you use a t4 template for generating the repository and servic code? It seems redundant and a lot of typing to do manually. Thanks

Ed - Sunday, February 2, 2014 8:58:48 AM

@Ed - Currently we did not used T4. Appreciate it if you could send a pull request in github.

shiju - Sunday, February 2, 2014 10:35:20 AM

Many thanks, Quite a lot of information!

Dunlap - Sunday, February 2, 2014 5:33:31 PM

RE: T4 Templates for repo and service code. Note, I do not know how to write these templates. Though here is a link to a blog which uses older technologies than you, but does a similar job. I've used this in the past and having the templates generate the code was a huge time saver. In it he uses the t4 templates.
http://tdryan.blogspot.com/2011/03/another-entity-framework-4-repository.html
If anyone knows how to write these templates it would be a much needed and incredible time saver for your solution.

Ed - Monday, February 3, 2014 12:04:06 AM

For those in the community with experience writing T4 templates, this download can be a great starting point
http://tdryan.codeplex.com/releases/view/62560
See this blog for example usage:
http://tdryan.blogspot.com/2011/03/another-entity-framework-4-repository_15.html

Ed - Monday, February 3, 2014 12:21:08 AM

Where can I get information on how you setup your nuget as a project? I've not seen this before.

Thank you

Lee - Monday, February 3, 2014 2:03:56 AM

Very good write ups, Appreciate it!

Llewelyn - Monday, February 3, 2014 1:14:52 PM

@Lee - In the latest version, you don't have to do anything for NuGet. Just build your solution, it will automatically restore your NuGet packages.

shiju - Monday, February 3, 2014 2:03:58 PM

DTO layer is missing no ?

Bob - Monday, February 3, 2014 8:35:47 PM

I can't run the site as I can't locate the db? Please help.

Anne - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 6:01:29 AM

@Anne - Please provide the data source in the connecting string of web.config section. Just look on this

shiju - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 2:54:21 PM

@Bob - Nothing is missing. Repository classes provide data persistence and Service Layer provides the application facade which can be used as business logic layer.

shiju - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 2:57:45 PM

Not sure if anyone else experienced this but running this app changed my IIS folder from C:\inetpub\wwwroot to the directory I ran the app from.

ryanbesko - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 7:38:31 PM

This is what I get:

HTTP Error 404.15 - Not Found
The request filtering module is configured to deny a request where the query string is too long.

Ted - Wednesday, February 5, 2014 1:35:25 AM

Amazing how Socialgoal.core has 1 file.

Bart - Wednesday, February 5, 2014 9:12:55 AM

@Bart - Currently it is just one, but just want to put common things to this project in future.

shiju - Wednesday, February 5, 2014 5:05:38 PM

Yes - this installation set my default web site to itself. I would appreciate it if the install was less intrusive. I am having to rebuild my web sites on my PC. Advice - don't install this reference app on a box you depend on.

Ted - Thursday, February 6, 2014 3:10:14 AM

Amazing many of good knowledge!

Beor - Thursday, February 6, 2014 4:20:07 AM

@Ted - The NuGet packages has been removed from source control. When you build the solution at first time, it will automatically restore NuGet package. Regarding the default web site in IIS, you can change this behavior from web project's properties.

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Orellana - Thursday, February 6, 2014 10:43:38 AM

Hello!

Some reason to use anemic domain model?

Eduardo Pires - Friday, February 7, 2014 2:13:20 AM

@Eduardo Pires - This app is not designed to be anemic domain model. I have started this sample app for giving training to a fresher engineer team where the primary focus was ASP.NET MVC and EF Code First. In future, we might re-design the domain model with domain services.

shiju - Friday, February 7, 2014 10:10:08 AM

I will give that a try. Thank you

Ted - Friday, February 7, 2014 1:13:07 PM

@Ted - The latest drop is configured to be used IIS Express instead of IIS.

shiju - Friday, February 7, 2014 2:16:38 PM

Is there a document that could possibly provide a brief overview of the code, how it was developed and designed?

Ameya - Friday, February 7, 2014 7:41:15 PM

Great content, Thank you!

Andrus - Monday, February 10, 2014 10:49:48 PM

You've made your stand very effectively!.

Hargis - Thursday, February 13, 2014 9:32:56 PM

Valuable data, Regards.

Danner - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:29:22 AM

Why we have interfaces and concrete classes are in a same file? Is not it good to separate these? If so, do you know the best naming convention? (Both for service and Repositories).
Thank you,

My Helper - Monday, March 3, 2014 10:30:28 PM

It's really nice application, specially for learners like me. It will be very handy if you provide a documentation on it.

Waqas - Monday, March 24, 2014 11:49:23 PM

Nice post, nice webapp.

Could you show us a sample on how to unit test a repository method in your app (by mocking dbset)?

Thanks.

dbtpictd - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:39:05 AM

Nice example but there are a few things I would consider changing.
- Move towards an CRQS pattern verse the services you have
- Disconnect your Data Model from the Domain Model (seperate set of models)
- Make your domain model have private setters and an parameterized constructor
- Place domain logic on the domain its self
- Have collections returned as IEnumerable to prevent adding items without using the domain model
- Move queries to the repository
- I would place Interfaces such as IRepo, IUnitOfWork into Core (More Onion Architecture like)

those are just based on what i'm currently doing. Non the less great example.

--James

James - Friday, April 25, 2014 8:32:53 PM

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