Build a web API with .NET Core using CLI Tools

In this blog i will start with an introduction to .NET Core CLI tools with an example of how to create a web API using the CLI tools provided with .NET Core. At the end we will set up a solution grouping an API project and a test project. Let's dive into the steps,

Step 1 :  Installing the tools

Need to install .NET Core and Visual Studio Code that are supported on Mac, Unix and Windows. You can read more on how it works on multi-platform/framework.

Step 2 :  Creating the solution

Let's open the terminal/Powershell as a administrator to create our solution. Lets create a solution named DotNetCoreDemoApi

  dotnet new sln -o DotNetCoreDemoApi  

The above command will create a new folder and DotNetCoreDemoApi a solution file with the  name DotNetCoreDemoApi sln .

Lets get into that folder.

Step 3: Creating the web API project

Run the following command,

 cd DotNetCoreDemoApi 

Now that the solution is here, we can create our API project. Lets name the web API as DotNetCoreDemoApi. Run the following command to create the project.

dotnet new webapi -o DotNetCoreDemoApi  

That command will create a sub folder named DotNetCoreDemoApi  inside the solution DotNetCoreDemoApi and the ouput is as follows.

The web API folder should contain a few files generated as above  but what we require right now is DotNetCoreDemoApi.csproj. We will add a reference to it in our solution. To do so, run the following command:

 dotnet sln add ./DotNetCoreDemoApi/DotNetCoreDemoApi.csproj

Step 4: Run the Web API
After getting a confirmation message as above , lets start the API by running that command:

 dotnet run --project DotNetCoreDemoApi  

After a few seconds, it should display a message  that the API is now running locally as above. You may access it at http://localhost:5000/api/values which is the Values API default endpoint.

That's all , API is ready and it is up and running locally. I will continue setting up the TestProject in the same solution in the upcoming blog. With the DotNet core it is very feasible to get your web api setup and running in 5 minutes. 

Build Web Applications With Angular 5 Using Visual Studio Code

My first post for the year 2018 and i wanted to write something about a technology in which i have vast experience and passionate about. This blog will be very useful for those who want to start with angular for developing web applications.In this blog i am going to set up Angular 5 app using Visual Studio Code. I will be using Angular CLI for our sample application. The following are the steps needed to create your first angular application using angular5.

Steps

• Install Node.js.
• Install Angular CLI.
• Design our  Angular App.
• Launch  App in the browser.
• Displaying our custom information on a page.

1. Install Node.js

In this approach, the first step is to install Node.js. If you have not installed nodejs in your machine visit the website and download according to your OS. You will see the following display.

Download and install the latest LTS version as per the configuration of your machine. The current version of Node LTS is 8.9.3. Installing node.js will also install npm (node package manager) on your system.

Next step is to make sure everything related to node is installed, To check the version of node and npm installed on your machine, run the following command in command prompt.

• node -v 
• npm -v

which will be as follows,

2. Install Angular CLI

We are done with the step1, next is to install angular cli. For those who are very new to angular , angular cli is a command line interface for angular applications. After installing node and npm, the next step is to install Angular CLI. Run the following command in a command window.

• npm install -g @angular/cli

The above command will start Angular CLI installation on your machine. This might take bit of time  based on the internet connectivity.

 3. Design our  Angular App.

That's all folks, we have setup the necessary environment to start coding. Lets create our application in a folder named Angular5Demo. Run the following command to create a folder for our application.

• mkdir Angular5Demo

lets navigate to our created folder, so run the following command.

• cd Angular5Demo

we are in the same folder where our application resides, so lets create our template/structure for our application using angular cli. run the following command

• ng new myFirstApp

if you have missed anything the following screen shows the steps and the output.

Lets see the code in visual studio code editor. Type code. in the command prompt.

• code .  

Which will open up the code in the visual studio code. And that’s it.  You can see the following file structure in Solution Explorer. We have created our first Angular app using VS Code and Angular CLI.

4. Launch  App in the browser

 To launch the application and to start the web server run the following command 

• ng serve 

After running this command, you can see that it is asking to open http://localhost:4200 in your browser. So, open any browser on your machine and navigate to this URL. Now, you can see the following page.

We'll leave the web server as it is while we look into the code of this application. Again open the code inside the path by typing the foolwoing command.

      code .

5. Displaying our custom information on a page.

Now, Let's display a message saying "" using JSON data on the page instead of the message “Welcome to app!”. To achieve this, open /src/app/app.component.ts file. Change it as follows or according to the data you want to see on the page.

and HTML template as,

Change the value of title property to a JSON object as shown above.  You can see the updated web page as shown below.

With angular cli If the web server is running and you make any changes in the Angular application, then you don’t need to refresh the web page. It will automatically update itself as you save the application code file. You can now play with the appellation by using various JSON objects also by making requests.

That's it folks, we have learned about creating our first Angular 5 app using VS Code and Angular CLI. Please post your valuable feedback in comments section.