Thoughts on .Net & Coding

While working with ASP.NET Core MVC, usually you have known number of actions and views. At times you might come across a situation where you need to deal with actions unknown at development time. Let me briefly explain a situation I recently stumbled upon.

ASP.NET Core allows you to build RESTful services using web API. Typically you want to return data and HTTP status codes from an API controller. To that end there are three ways to return values from an API controller. This article discusses them with an example.

Browsers do not allow cross origin communication for security reasons. This means if an ASP.NET Core web API housed in one web app is called by JavaScript code running as a part of another web app, the communication attempt will fail. However, you can alter this default behavior by adding some configuration in your API application. To that end this article discusses how that task can be accomplished.

While working with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core you need to create data model for your application. This calls for creating a DbContext class along with one or more entity classes. Luckily, EF Core allows you to reverse engineer the model from an existing database. To that end this article discusses how that can be accomplished.

In one of my past articles I discussed how to deal with XML data in ASP.NET Web APIs. Although JSON is quite popular format in API communication, at times you might need to handle XML data. To that end this article describes the required configuration with a simple example.

In my last two articles (you can read them here and here) we discussed how JWT authentication can be implemented in ASP.NET Core APIs and jQuery client. In this article we will use .NET Core's HttpClient component to perform JWT authentication.

In my previous article we discussed what JWT authentication is and how to implement it in ASP.NET Core APIs. In that article you learnt to use Postman tool to test the JWT functionality. In most of the real-world cases you will be handling the JWT using either client side script (jQuery, Angular etc.) or server side code (HttpClient component). To that end this article discusses using jQuery to consume the SecurityController and EmployeeController we developed earlier.

If you developed web applications using ASP.NET before, chances are you are already familiar with cookie authentication. Although cookie based authentication is still available under ASP.NET Core, JSON Web Token or JWT based authentication is becoming more and more common. To that end this article aims at introducing you to JWT and JWT based authentication.