K. G. Sreeju Nair

Microsoft Build is an annual conference designed for developers, software engineers and tech professionals. This year, Microsoft Build will take place from Tuesday, May 23 to Thursday, May 25, offering attendees the choice to participate either in-person or online.  The conference serves as a platform for Microsoft to unveil new tools, technologies, and updates while providing valuable educational sessions and workshops to help developers enhance their skills.

For years, I have been using System.Net.Mail namespace to send email from my ASP.Net applications. Recently one of my friend asked my assistance in troubleshooting the email delivery issues from a newly deployed application. It was interesting that the same deployed code was sending email with the same configuration settings. However, I noticed, the test environment is Windows and the Production is Ubuntu. I wanted to understand is there any difference, do we need to add any extra parameters when using Linux, So I went into the SmtpClient documentation, that was used by the developer to send the Email.

This post is a continuation of my previous post, Globalization & Localization in ASP.Net Core 7,  (https://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/globalization-localization-in-asp-net-core-7), where I explained the importance of Globalization and Localization and how to apply them to your Razor Pages. However, the previous post only covered localizing Razor Pages and did not discuss localizing the layout files of an ASP.Net Core Razor Pages application. In this post, we will be exploring how to localize the text in the layout files, so I encourage you to read the previous post to gain a better understanding of the localization topics covered in this post.

In today's world, it is becoming increasingly common for applications to be written with a global audience in mind. Globalization and localization are two key concepts that developers must consider when creating software to support multiple languages / cultures.

Performance is a key factor for any application, especially for web & mobile applications. Based on various research studies, it has been identified that high performing sites retain users than low performing sites. This means a poor performing site will have impact on the company’s business goals. So, Developers, be aware to make sure your applications are designed for faster response times.

One of the aspects that affect the performance of an application is Caching. With caching, you store the frequently accessed data and store in some temporary storage, As a developer, you should carefully consider the various caching mechanisms and implement them in your applications.

Caching in ASP.Net Application

ASP.Net supports both In-Memory Cache and Distributed Cache. Let me illustrate the basic differences.

In-Memory Cache

In-Memory Cache, your application uses Server memory to store the cached data. This works perfectly if you have only one server. In today’s world, where you use cloud services and automatically scale your applications, all your servers need to access the cached data from a single source, and In-Memory cache will not help you here,

Distributed Cache

In distributed cache, the cached data is stored and shared across all servers. ASP.Net supports several types of distributed cache implementations such as SQL Server, Redis, NCache etc.

In this article, I am going to demonstrate how to implement distributed cache with SQL Server. For the purpose of this demo, I created a .Net application using the template “ASP.Net Core Web App”. The screenshot of the app in solution explorer is given below.

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While developing applications, you may come across various occasions where you create background services to achieve automation in your applications. Such services include sending notification, update a user’s subscription expiration or may be changing the state of a workflow activity and so on.

Developers use Windows Service, Cron jobs or Executables that works in a separate thread than your web applications that works based on a schedule. In .Net, for creating a background task, developers mainly use the Console Application or Windows Service template. While this will do the job, it adds some complexity. Few of the issues developers face with background services are below

• You may use configuration files in the web application such as connection string, logs file path etc, however for the console application, you need to redefine them under its application settings, something your operation team will not prefer, of course this adds operations complexity.
• Migrating the application may lead to troubles as I have seen several times, the migration happens without migrating the background service and then developers troubleshoot and identifies they forgot some of the services.
• Modifying the code in the application and database structure may impact the background service.
• And many more

Though it had limitations, developers used it a lot especially when they need to implement background services. Now with the ASP.Net framework has built in capability to run background tasks from the web application itself. Cool, for many of you, it must be music to your ears, now from the same project you can manage your pages, application logic and background services.

Background Service in Asp.Net application

In ASP.Net background tasks can be implemented as hosted services. In this article, I am going to demonstrate how you can develop a background service in ASP.Net

For the purpose of this demo, I used the following environment.

• ASP.Net 6
• Visual Studio 2022 Preview
• ASP.Net Web application

Also, I have a class in my application called Task that has a due date and Is Completed flag. I have a page that create a task by setting a due date. Now I am going to create a background service in ASP.Net application itself that set IsCompleted to true for tasks when it reaches the due date.

See the Task class below.

public class Task
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public DateTime DueDate { get; set; }
    public bool IsCompleted { get; set; }
    public DateTime ActionDate { get; set; }
}
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For years I have been using Visual Studio for developing .Net applications. While Visual Studio is a great IDE is for enterprise application development, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code that is simpler and mostly general-purpose editor. Visual Studio Code is awesome, lightweight, cross-platform and you can extend it with plug-ins. Recently I have been asked by a friend of mine to suggest him an editor for him to learn Python, and I thought of suggesting him Visual Studio Code. I prepared a video tutorial that explains how to setup Visual Studio Code to create, edit, debug and run Python applications.

With the advancement in technologies, the world has become a global village. The people all over the world are interconnected. It is quite common that the companies publish their contents in multiple languages. With trade laws differ from country to country the developers need to make their website address the users who visit their web application by identifying the user’s country.