Thoughts on .Net & Coding

While developing ASP.NET Core web applications you often need to transfer data residing in one object into another. You can accomplish this task manually by setting properties of the target object with the values from the source object. But wouldn't it be nice if this task can be automated? That's what the AutoMapper library is about. In this article you learn to use AutoMapper in an ASP.NET Core application.

In the previous article we displayed a list of files from Google Drive. By now you know how to configure a Google API project and establish a connection with your Google drive. In this part you will build on top of what you learned in the previous part. Firstly you will provide Download functionality to the list of files displayed in the browser. The downloaded file(s) is saved in the wwwroot folder and can be used by your application for further processing. Secondly, you will also learn to upload files from your ASP.NET Core web application to the Google drive.

Google drive offers a convenient way to organize and store your files in cloud. It has a rich user web interface that can be used to work with the files and folders. At times, however, you need to deal with the files stored in Google drive through an ASP.NET Core application. Consider a situation where you want to import files from user's Google drive into your web application for certain processing. Now this requires that you get a list of files from the user's Google drive and manipulate them as and when necessary. To that end this article shows how to use Google Drive API in an ASP.NET Core application to get a list of files from the Google drive.

At time your ASP.NET Core web applications want to display certain data in the form of bar chart or pie chart. Although there are plenty third-party components and libraries that you can use to accomplish this task, Google Charts is a simple yet feature rich client side option. To that end this article shows how Google Charts can be used to render simple bar charts and pie charts.

At times you need to store images in a data store rather than storing them as physical files. You can store them in and retrieve them from SQL Server using Entity Framework Core and ASP.NET Core. This article shows you how.

If you have worked with ASP.NET Core Web APIs before, chances are you used HttpClient to invoke them. Although instantiating HttpClient directly is a common way of using it, there is a better alternative. Rather than instanting HttpClient yourself you can use IHttpClientFactory to obtain an instance of HttpClient. The HttpClient object thus obtained can be used to invoke the Web API. In this article I discuss three ways to obtain an HttpClient instance using IHttpClientFactory.

If you are a beginner in ASP.NET Core chances are at some point in time you stumbled upon this - .NET Standard. You probably wondered what it is and how is it different than .NET Framework and .NET Core. Although you might have heard this term, while developing your ASP.NET Core apps you might not have bothered about it at all. This might have made you wonder even more as to what's the use of .NET Standard if it's not actively used while developing your apps. You might have also felt bit confusing about the version number that accompanies .NET Standard. This article attempts to explain all these questions about .NET Standard from beginner's perspective. My aim is to quickly enable you to grasp the concept and utility of .NET Standard and I also provide pointers for more detailed understanding.

In Part -1 and Part - 2 of this article you created EmployeeCRUD service definition using Protocol Buffer language and also implemented it in EmployeeCRUDService class. So, our gRPC service is now ready. In this part we will consume the service in an ASP.NET Core MVC application. Begin by opening the GrpcService1 project you created earlier. Add a new ASP.NET Core MVC application in the same solution. Then copy the Protos folder from the GrpcService1 project into the newly created MVC application. At this stage your Solution Explorer will look like this.