Month: November 2017

What is SignalR?

The beginnings

ASP.Net (both “bare” Web Forms and ASP.Net MVC introduced later) is developed around a traditional HTTP request and response mechanism –
the server provides content in form of HTML pages or files only when they are being requested by client. In contrast, SignalR provides two-way communication between server and client – both can trigger actions in each other and the result can be shown immediately in a browser without the need for refreshing.
The last part assumes that there is a browser involved – which doesn’t necessarily has to be true, as apart from javascript implementation of SignalR, a C# one (with more already announced) exists – SignalR isn’t constrained to just web pages.

One of the main selling points of SignalR was its simplicity of use. With just a few lines of code, it was easy to set up a simple chat. (And not only that – one of the examples provided by Microsoft was a browser multiplayer shooter game).

Continue reading “A taste of SignalR Core”

What is Entity Framework?

For those who never stumbled upon Entity Framework, it is Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework. Its main purpose is to provide an abstraction of a database, so you can use the database as if using normal in-memory data collections.

In practice, you still need to be mindful of what you do write your LINQ upon, especially time-wise. However, the simplicity of building a database-powered persistence is stunning and, in my opinion, worth investing your time required for learning this framework.

Continue reading “Introduction to Entity Framework Core”

The origins…

Microsoft has released the first version of ASP.NET together with .NET 1.0 in 2002. That version was focused on so called “Web Forms”. The main idea was to give the web-developer the same look and feel as he would have had while working with a usual windows application. So he got the designer file for a user interface, on which he could drag & drop controls, having code-behind executing logic underneath on the server side.

Continue reading “ASP .NET Core – Introduction”