ASP.NET Web API parameter binding part 1 – Understanding binding from URI

net asp.net web api c-sharp

Today, let’s kick off a series intended to look at different aspects of HTTP parameter binding in ASP.NET Web API. Why? Aside from the awesome series by Mike Stall, there isn’t really that much material on the web on this particular subject. And developers coming from MVC background, often get surprised by differences in the model binding mechanism between MVC and Web API.

In this first post, let’s have a brief overview of parameter binding in Web API and then specifically look at binding model from URI.

More after the jump.

Collaborative route planner with SignalR, Knockout.js and Google Maps

net c-sharp knockout.js signalr
Today I have published a new article over at my friends from Tech.pro. This time, we continue on the topic of SignalR & Knockout.js, and look at implementing a real-time collaborative route planner with the use of Google Maps API. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the article as much as I enjoyed writing it. These libraries, really make a lot the development tasks feel like true magic! As you usually, the source code is on GitHub.

Hosting ASP.NET Web API in LinqPad

net asp.net web api c-sharp

Today I stumbled upon an interesting Stackoverflow question, where the user was asking how to go about self-hosting Web API in LinqPad.

The question has gone unanswered since December, and I’m guessing even the OP forgot about it. However, I’d like to elaborate a bit about the topic. You certainly can host Web API in LinqPad, provided you plug in a quick work around - and we actually did hit a similar issue with scriptcs.

Per request error detail policy in ASP.NET Web API

net asp.net web api c-sharp

ASP.NET Web API does a really good job at letting you control the amount of error details returned in the framework responses. And that is for both your own (“developer-generated”) exceptions, as well as the ones produced by the Web API itself.

However, this setting (IncludeErrorDetailPolicy) is global, and configured against the HttpConfiguration, making runtime manipulation of the error detail policy rather difficult.

However there is a trick you can use.

More after the jump.

Shopping cart with SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and Knockout.js

net asp.net web api c-sharp knockout.js signalr
I have published an article at Tech.pro today, about building a real-time shopping cart with some of our favorite technologies - ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Knockout.js (or, as Brad would say, with the “Webstack of Love”). Click here to head over there and read the article!

Leveraging Roslyn to author ASP.NET Web API without recompiling

net asp.net web api c-sharp roslyn

Some time ago I posted a mini-series of posts about using Roslyn to script Web API, and that has gotten some great response. In that original post, I mentioned & used, without going into too much details, a very useful “compiler as a service” feature Roslyn offers.

Recently, Glenn Block started a very exciting project called scriptcs (which now Justin Rusbtach and I happen to be a part of too) to provide a seamless/node.js-esque scripting experience for C# and in that project we indeed leverage on Roslyn heavily - to do some behind the scenes tricks to hide the compilation aspect from the user, so that it really resembles pure script execution.

Adding HTTP HEAD support to ASP.NET Web API

net asp.net web api c-sharp

HEAD HTTP verb is defined in RFC 2616 as “identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response.” As such you can think of it as a twin brother of GET.

There are a lot of use cases for HEAD: pinging without the overhead of transferring data, or simply requesting information about the size of a resource (which can be used to provide download progress bar), just to name a few.

Unfortunately, out of the box, ASP.NET Web API doesn’t provide a mechanism of supporting HEAD or coupling GET & HEAD.

We can work around that.

SignalR, Filters and ServiceStack

servicestack signalr
I recently blogged about a technique of integrating SignalR with ASP.NET Web API through the use of action filters. A few people have asked, whether this approach (and SignalR now being part of Microsoft’s ASP.NET product group after all) works with other frameworks. And the answer is absolutely yes. Let’s have a look at implementing this for ServiceStack. Adding ServiceStack 🔗You should probably have a look at the original article first, since the SignalR part of it will be identical.

ASP.NET Web API and Protocol Buffers

net asp.net web api c-sharp

Protocol Buffers are a super efficient and very flexible way of serializing structured data. Developed at Google, provide the developers lightspeed serialization and deserialization capabilities.

There a handful of .NET implementations, the most popular one, called protobuf-net, created by Marc Gravell from StackExchange. On top of that library, WebApiContrib project has a Web API Protocol Buffers formatter ready for you to plug in.

More after the jump.

SignalR, ActionFilters and ASP.NET Web API

net asp.net web api c-sharp signalr

There have been quite a few examples circulating on the web on how one would use SignalR together with Web API. It all started after Brad Wilson had a great example on calling SignalR from API controllers at NDC Oslo 2012.

Even on this blog we looked at calling SignalR from Web API ITraceWriter to provide realtime tracing capabilities.

How about, to avoid any controller-level noise, messaging the connected SignalR subscribers from ActionFilters? While this approach might not be applicable in all scenarios, when it is, I think it could provide a nice layer of separation.

More after the jump.

About

Hi! I'm Filip W., a software architect from Zürich 🇨🇭. I like Toronto Maple Leafs 🇨🇦, Rancid and quantum computing. Oh, and I love the Lowlands 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿.

You can find me on Github, on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

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