Leveraging Acceptance Criteria When Writing Agile User Stories

As near as I can tell, everyone who's doing Agile is writing requirements in the user story format of "As <role> I need to <do something> so that I can <achieve some goal>." For example, "As a customer I need to be able to search the inventory so that I can find the products I want to buy."

Posted by Peter Vogel on 11/15/20190 comments

Mocking an Authenticated User in Blazor/ASP.NET Core

I've done a couple of recent columns about securing Blazor Components and using claims-based policies declaratively in ASP.NET Core generally. While working with security, I'm always interested in doing end-to-end testing: Starting up the application and seeing what happens when I try to navigate to a page.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 11/14/20190 comments

Extend Your .NET Namespaces for Static Methods and Simpler Code

Let's say you've gone to the trouble of creating a CustomerRepository object with a static method called GetCustomerById. Something like this, in other words:

public class CustomerRepository
{
   public static Customer GetCustomerById(int Id)
   {

   }
}

In your file where you want to use that method you've added the appropriate using statement. Something like this, for example:

Posted by Peter Vogel on 11/08/20190 comments

Arranging Columns in Visual Studio Windows (with Sorting!)

Admittedly, the tool window I use most in Visual Studio is the Error List (I probably use it even more than I use Solution Explorer). By and large it meets my needs but it is customizable for those occasions when it does not.

For example, the default Error List display includes a Suppression State column that I hardly ever use. If you don't use it either, you can get rid of it, making more room for the columns you do want (to be more specific: the Description column). All you have to do is right-click on any of the column headers in the Error List and pick Show Columns from the pop-up menu. That will give you a menu of available columns with the currently displayed columns checked off. Clicking on any column in the menu will add the column to the display (if the column isn't currently checked) or remove the column (if it is checked). I don't find the Code column all that useful, either, so I got rid of it also, but that might just be crazy talk as far as you're concerned.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/30/20190 comments

Why Rejection Prevents Zombies in ASP.NET Core

If you're looking for some interesting reading, try this article by Paulo Gomes on hacking ASP.NET (actually, try googling “Hacking ASP.NET” for a bunch of interesting articles). Paulo's article specifically discusses how an innocent Web application can be used to turn your organization's server into some hacker's puppet/zombie.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/22/20190 comments

How to Integrate Code with Code Snippets in Visual Studio

As I've noted in an earlier post, I don't use code snippets much (i.e. “at all”). One of the reasons that I don't is that I often have existing code that I want to integrate with whatever I'm getting from the code snippets library.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/21/20190 comments

Calling .NET Methods With and Without Async

Let's say that you have an asynchronous method -- a method that looks something like this one that returns a Customer object wrapped inside a Task object:

public async Task<Customer> GetCustomerById(string custId) {

You can call this method with or without the await keyword. The syntax with the await keyword looks like this:

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/17/20190 comments

Upgrading to ASP.NET Core Version 3.0: Top Tips

So you got excited about ASP.NET Core and started building an application in ASP.NET Core 2.0, 2.1, or 2.2. Now you're wondering how much work is involved in migrating that application to Version 3.0 which came out in late September.

If you've got a vanilla application the answer is ... it's not that painful. For example, to upgrade to Version 3.0, you just need to go into your csproj file and strip out almost everything to leave this:

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/14/20190 comments

How to Create New Code Snippets from Existing Ones in Visual Studio

I'm not a big user of code snippets, but I know developers who are. I've noticed those developers often don't use the default value supplied for the variable part of the snippet (What! All your connection strings aren't in a variable named "conn"?). If you're one of those people or you'd just be happier with a couple more variations on the code snippets that come with Visual Studio, here's how to make that happen.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/10/20190 comments

How to Efficiently Validate Against Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks in ASP.NET Core

If you're worried about CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks (and you probably should be), then you've already added the code to your Views that adds an anti-forgery token to the data that the browser sends back to the server. If you're using HTML Helpers, that code looks like this:

@Html.AntiForgeryToken()

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/17/20190 comments

How to Handle Multiple HttpClients in the Same ASP.NET Core Application

It's not impossible that you're accessing several different methods from the same Web Service in your application. If so, and if you're using the HttpClientFactory (and you should be), you have an opportunity to centralize some of your code.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/16/20190 comments

You're Using HttpClient Wrong

There's a very good chance that, every time you need to access a Web Service, you've been creating an HttpClient object and then throwing it away. Unfortunately, that's bad for your application because you can run out of WebSockets (yes, even if you call the object's Dispose method before discarding it). Though, I have to admit, you'll only have this problem if you use the HttpClient a lot. Still, it's a bad idea to keep creating and destroying it.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/12/20190 comments