.NET

The yearly Stephen Toub blog post we were waiting for is finally here

Firstly, I need to mention I'm coming back to .Net for the first time in more than 10 years. Last time I used .Net was on a very old .Net Framework 4 ASP.NET commercial fast food ordering application in 2013. Since then I've been working with Environmental Scientists, researchers, and academics, using exclusively Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI, etc) for the last 10 years.

This new project I'm tasked with is a custom content publishing platform, so my first thought is obviously a CMS for the content. I feel that Headless CMS products are the go-to these days, and that fits well with our needs because it is the authoring/admin side that the customer is most interested in. The frontend, or "content consumption" side of things is a custom scientific data visualizer we are building in parallel.

My team has been given a MS Azure Cloud subscription to use, and we want to take advantage of as many "cloud-native" approaches as we can. Eg, using Azure Active Directory (AAD) for SSO, using Azure Blob storage for files, Azure SQL for DB, etc. For that reason, we have decided to use .Net to develop this CMS (plus, one of my guys has 5 years experience in .Net, so we don't want that to go to waste).

There are so many free open-source .Net CMS projects floating around that it should be pretty easy to pick one to use as a base to build upon. But it is proving to be a bit harder to choose than I thought. This is the wish list we are looking for:

• Free and Open-Source, with permissive licence
• Self-hosted, ie. not a SaaS
• Cross-platform, with dotNet6 or dotNet7
• Needs custom entity types, and entity type instances (we are publishing data types, not Posts and Pages).
• Customizable content authoring pages for the custom entity types
• Admin UI written in VueJS or ReactJS
• Access the content via an Open API
• Integration with AAD SSO (and bonus if we can use any SAML or OAuth or OIDC Auth)
• Different user roles (Admin, Author, Reviewer)
• Use other cloud-native integrations where possible
• Workflow steps (Draft, Submit, Review, Approve, Publish, Revoke, etc)
• Content versioning, change tracking
• Activity auditing

I know this is a pipedream to find one tool that could do all of that out of the box. Back in my Uni days I would have immediately reached for Drupal, but that is PHP, we prefer to not use that anymore. I thought I found the perfect tool when I came across Cofoundry, it ticks a surprisingly large number of those wishlist boxes. The main reasons I am hesitant to go with Cofoundry are:

• It is a project from 2017. It has continued to be updated, but not very often since 2018. It was ported from .Net Core to dotNet6 back in 2021, but nothing since then.
• It uses Angular 1 for the JS side of the admin pages (not even Angular 2!)
• They are very tightly tied into using MS SQL Server for the db with a bunch of custom MS TSQL stored procedures, and using other MS SQL Server-specific features.

I've looked at a bunch of others, but they tend to fall into the camp of SaaS offerings that are focused on publishing Posts and Pages, and not much else, or others that are hobby projects with low user base, and haven't been updated in the last 4 years.

Is there anything I'm missing? I'm looking for something a lot like Cofoundry, but more up to date, not so tightly tied to MSSQL Server, and uses ReactJS or VueJS for the Admin/Authoring pages.

Following the announcement of Visual Studio for Mac’s retirement, for the next 65 hours we are offering a 65% discount on new subscriptions for Rider, the only cross-platform .NET IDE.

The offer is valid for a new one-year personal subscription purchased before 6:00 am UTC, September 4, 2023.

I'm happy to announce that our .NET community has just crossed the 1000-subscriber mark!

Thank you for your enthusiasm, support, and contributions. Let's keep the .NET discussions and knowledge-sharing going strong!

Released a new Visual Studio extension: Mjml Visualizer!

https://github.com/sboulema/MjmlVisualizer

Do you work with MJML (https://mjml.io/) in Visual Studio? This is the extension for you! It adds a debug visualizer that will show the MJML string, the HTML string and a rendered preview of the HTML.

Also some fun takeaways: it also makes external calls to azure to load configuration and stays silent after updating for 2 weeks before showing warnings.

Moq is unusable. Needs to be forked or repoaced. Time to switch to NSubstitute.

I didn't find this anywhere convenient when I was troubleshooting so I thought I'd post this here.

We have some large projects with a lot of dependency injection, and it was taking up to a minute to start a local dev API. After a lot of troubleshooting we found it was the dependency injection validation, which is optional and disabled in production - you can turn it off using:

webBuilder.UseDefaultServiceProvider(o =>
{
  o.ValidateScopes = true;
  o.ValidateOnBuild = false;
});

in the ConfigureWebHostDefaults() section, before the webBuilder.UseStartup() call. (I'm pretty sure this is the default template but it's been a while since I set it up..)

Saves around 50 seconds when waiting for a local API to start - obviously you don't get nice messages if you've created an issue with your dependencies so be aware of that.

I'd probably also explicitly disable ValidateScopes when it's not a dev environment but that has a lower performance impact.

I wanted to exchange some experience regarding private NuGet feed hosting solutions.

We have used MyGet for years both for our private and public packages. But recently it became so unstable that it would not be responsible to not investigate the alternatives. I looked into Azure Artifacts first because, we already have Azure Devops and it comes free. The transition was mostly painless (I plan to write about it in more detail soon). But hosting public feeds doesn't seem as easy. One needs to create a public project just for that. So, we still use MyGet for public feeds for now. But will move them also elsewhere.

What are your experiences with private feed hosting? Do you host them yourselves or use a paid service?

This is not to be confused with the Avalonia UI framework which remains free and open source.

XPF is a new project by the same team that allows existing WPF apps to be cross-platform (so enterprises can take their existing Windows-only apps and run them on MacOS, Linux and maybe WebAssembly). It's in early stages so I don't know how well it works.

• Reauthentication flows are now working as expected when using the "Windows authentication broker" as the default authentication mechanism.
• Linux C++ Cross Platform with cmake - No Caching of realpath command
• Error Running Test Case using MS Fakes on arm64(UnitTestIsolationException)
• Error while using Visual Studio 2022 Schema Compare while comparing an Azure SQL DB schema with a VS Database Project

"A Visual Studio extension that checks and notifies about available updates for the installed NuGet packages for the open solution."

This time no fancy new features, but a complete refactor of the project structure which will keep the extension easy to maintain.

Thanks goes to @tomenglert