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. 

Start using Azure Logic apps and save your time

This is my first blog and Azure and i am inspired to write this one after attending the Microsoft's workshop "App innovation day".

There was a cool technology "Windows Workflow Foundation" provided by Microsoft with dot net framework to create workflows to cater business logic in dot net applications. With Azure, The Logic Apps service fulfill the purpose to have business processes or workflows take shape of an app. It required no coding just simple logic that needs to placed in a right way to have right business flow. It was also meant for the purpose of integrating 3rd party apps like Facebook,YouTube, Twitter and Evernote etc. All we need to have is the dynamic work flow.

There are different benefits and different use cases in which we can apply azure logic apps. Let's discuss some of the benefits when using logic apps!

Rapid development

Logic Apps is great for rapid development.With ever growing list of connectors, we can easily create a workflow to monitor invoice, send for approval to a admin, upload to dropbox and send email notification in matter of few seconds.

Solutions with Hybrid cloud

5 years back ,Lot of businesses have invested heavily in on premises solutions and hardware, so it’s not possible to move everything to the cloud. With Logic Apps, it’s easy to have a hybrid cloud during this transition. With its on premises data gateway, you can easily connect your on premises database, file share, BizTalk server to Azure cloud.

It is the new way of Automating business process. You can build long running business process, that orchestrate data and services across all cloud services and not just Azure. It's not only for the developers but for everyone. The best bit you need to write code , you can use Visual editor to build your orchestration.

Lets Dive into Simple Demo

Use Case: Filter twitter feeds with specific hashtags and post the specific tweets on the Facebook wall.

In this example , i just created a process that repeats every few minutes to pull some data from twitter feed and post it on your Facebook wall. Even though this feature is already supported with Facebook, here its slightly different since it is filtering only the specific keywords which is a custom filtering.

The entire flow i described about is composted of 3 simple steps , that you can build using a Visual UI.

Step 1: Select Logic App click "Create" and give a specific name ,resource 

 Step 2: There are number of workflow templates will be shown as below and select the appropriate one , in this case i will use "when a new tweet is posted"

also authorize with your twitter account from which you want to fetch the feeds

Also configure the conditions by mentioning the filters and the timeline you want to trigger the action.

Step 3: Next step is to post on facebook wall , click "Add step"  

Search for Facebook and authenticate will your Facebook account as follows,

Click post to my timeline

Also you can map the fields that you want to fetch from the feed and post it on the wall as below,

That's it folks, once all fields are mapped you need to save the Logic app with the save button.

With the above 3 steps posting a filtered tweet on Facebook wall is configured and can be scheduled as you need. If the above particular feature needs to be developed without azure means it will need a huge development time and cost, which can be avoided using the Logic app as shown above.

That's the demo. You can explore several steps and several templates provided in the portal without 

writing a single line of code. I will be writing a separate blog on how to configure custom logic app 

in the upcoming blog posts. Happy connecting with app logic!