.Net Foundation .Net Community Standups, 27 Oct 2020

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From YouTube: ASP.NET Community Standup - Updating Scott Hanselman's blog to .NET Core

Description

Scott Hanselman and Mark Downie show us how they updated Scott's blog and Hanselminutes podcast websites to .NET Core.

Featuring: Scott Hanselman (@shanselman), Mark Downie (@poppastring)

Community Links: https://www.theurlist.com/aspnet-standup-2020-10-27

#aspnet #blog #dotnet5

A

A

A

Well, hello: everyone welcome to the asp.net community stand up today. We have well scott hanselman or mark downey on so I'm john galloway, I'm a pm on the gottmault community team and scott. A lot of people know who you are, but for newcomers, can you introduce yourself.

B

I'm scott hanselman and I manage dotnet community and if I seem a little off right now, I'm post surgery and I'm about 80 I've got like a background process in my cpu. You know what I mean like. I have a mental task manager right now, and it's not like 20 is like my arm is numb, so I'm just kind of waiting for this to wake up. So, if I feel off, I apologize ahead of time.

A

Well, uh 20 slower scott. I can maybe keep up with you today, we'll see and mark mark nice to have you on. Thank.

C

You very much hi yeah, I'm mark downey, I'm a program manager on the visual studio side of things I um I'm kind of vested in the production diagnostic space awesome.

A

So and today we'll be talking about how you updated hanselman blog like so, it's got your blog and also hansel minutes website, as well. To.Net 5 right.

B

Yeah, it's been an ongoing gosh. We've been thinking about this for what a year now 18 months, yeah at least like this- is all spare time stuff right I mean I have a blog mark as a blog, it's been around forever, but you don't just convert it to net core move it into a container into linux, move it into the cloud not break any urls in a weekend.

B

So he and I do it in fits and starts where I'm on the west coast he's on a different time zone and I'm like hey, do you got an hour and we kind of go back and forth. We've been doing this, I think since last summer, yeah.

A

B

Yeah, I think, and we'll.

A

Dig into this in detail, but I think you know.

B

Somebody was like, oh, it should take just.

A

A few minutes to update to 9.95 and it's like yeah, but it's all the legacy, it's all the not breaking things, it's all the stuff, so cool, I'm going to jump into our community links. As always, we love community, I'm going to be sharing these links out. Actually I'll. Do that now throw that into the chat, so people can follow along if they'd, like so some good ones.

A

So we called out uh rahul and he's been doing these. These um he's got a great channel going. So this is, uh we mentioned him in september. He's continuing to cook uh kick out some really good ones. So this one he's been doing a series on single page applications and single page applications like he started with the basics of here's.

A

What's in the templates in this video he's showing doing the whole build pipeline, so he just published this one earlier in october and then he's been digging in since then into some things with like http client, and you know, working on client, client calls and stuff. uh So, but with this one, the the code's out on github- and so the specifics here, it goes through creating a single page application with react sets up the build pipeline.

A

So here you can see in azure, devops configuring the build pipeline and then doing the full deployment out to azure so great stuff. um So definitely subscribe to this he's he's creating a lot of great content, all right, this one's fun.

A

So this is a blazer guys got blazer galaga, and this is not just like kind of looks a bit like galaga like it is galaga, it's crazy, so um he's using howler js for the audio he's using a canvas component and um like the whole thing I mean I don't know if that's coming through, but it's the game, it's crazy. So um it's really cool to see this whole like building out like this is you know here he's going optimizing for 60 frames per second.

A

This is high performance like really cool stuff, so need to see that speaking of blasting off in rockets and blazer we've got dave brock and he's doing a series uh where he's doing a getting to know blazer and the focus of this one he's using the nasa astronomical picture of the day api and he's doing his approach to this. Is you know nothing about blazer? That's fine! I'm going to teach you, so he builds up all the stuff in here.

A

So he talks about you know even like what is it, what are the hosting models and stuff so very cool? He goes through um talks about making his api calls.

A

um He uh you know walks through his his function calls and all that and at the very so this is great if you're new to blazer, if you, if you don't, really know anything about it, you know this is a whole building, a non-trivial application.

A

So of course, the code's out on github and definitely a good one to read through all right this one's another fun one. This is from monk soul, and this is uh this is actually from from china.

A

The the site is, is all this content is actually in chinese, so I'm using the trans, uh you know browser translate features, um but, but especially if you were a chinese speaking, viewer welcome for one thing and uh this this is a very chinese um friendly like all that, for instance, if you, if you look at the docs he's, got again, I've translated this website to english, but he's got all uh these stocks are in chinese. uh You know great great information.

A

So the idea of what this um fur framework is: it's a optimized uh best practice enterprise application framework, so he's building on top of net core or net five, and so this is including um he's got uh jenkins.

A

Integration for build he's got a cli and the whole idea is it's it's an opinionated framework and it's built towards uh you know, get started quickly and he's kind of kind of guides you towards building an enterprise, best practice application, so very cool all right, uh danielle gomez, camarillo talking about vvm, so we we've talked about and we'll be talking about. Upgrading you know existing uh asp.net uh from you know, going back to dotnet framework applications and some different ways: different approaches to moving on to dot net core, and one of course is blazer.

A

We've had some good shows on that uh recently, but another nice one to keep in mind this dot. Vvm and one nice thing with that. Vvm is, you can run side by side, so you can vvm will work with asp.net on.net framework, and then you can kind of do your updates to it, and then you can flip over to net core.

A

So if you need to do a phased uh migration like that, this is this is a nice alternative and uh it's also built using uh it's a mvvm style so as opposed to blazer being component based, and you can definitely build mvvm. On top of that, this is very much a you build views and view models.

A

So if that kind of style feels good to you, then that's also nice. um So here we're using a bootstrap four template to build out a uh a dashboard. uh It shows the kind of setup. So here we've got our views, view models, data access, layer, etc, and then just some things to point out, you know again building out- and this is a relatively straightforward thing, with views and view models, there's also master pages. So again, this is kind of a feels.

A

You know, um asp.net on.net framework feels that the whole kind of easy to update your master pages to a dot master and then the kind of final end design. Here we end up with a style, let me get to the so. It translates very much so here we've got like a grid view, text, column and grid view. So uh and we've we had jeff fritz on recently talking about updating web forms to blazer components, and that's definitely, you know an option, but just want to point this out, especially for that kind of phase.

A

Migration is nice all right, philip talking about beautiful and compact web apis with c csharp9 and asp.net core. So in this one he talks about taking a you know, pretty straightforward web api and using things like record syntax and top level programs, so top level statements here. So, even just a simple case of going from this is your simplest before top level, and now here we've got. This is a top level program there completely right. So we we can kind of get rid of some of the extra noise, especially if you're writing very light.

A

uh You know tight apis, that's a few lines of code that cuts this in a third right. So uh he also talks about records, an important feature in c sharp. Nine- and uh you know, you've got this syntax, but you've also got this syntax as well, and the important thing I saw jimmy bogart was, you know, tweeting, just over the past few days about updating a sample. He did the records and you can. You can write mutable records, even though records do make it possible to write immutable data structures, um and so using this syntax.

A

Here is going to generate that constructor for you. So um so then he goes through and just talks about building from a simple asp.net, core api and I'll just kind of jump to the end. He walks through several different kind of steps along the way, looking at things like serialization and authentication, but the kind of end result is this um this right here. So this is a non-trivial api defining you know all the routes and everything and it's 89 lines of code.

A

So and again this is a you can do it tighter, but this has support for things like deserialization and authorization and including the entire like function. You know this is your entire app right here. So that's pretty impressive to see that all right, just a few more uh we've got john hilton he's talking about integrating blazer wasm components into your existing razer pages applications.

A

So it's you know, a lot of the things you'll see will be if you you're forced to make a choice right at the beginning, I'm making a razor pages app. So I'm going to do this or I'm making a blazer app. So I'm going to do this and what's nice is it's all web technologies and it all integrates together?

A

It's it takes a little bit of doing and he walks through a few things, but he talks about um you know integrating it in you. It's standard scripts and components. It's it's uh some static content.

A

You do need an app uh div that you need that it's expecting to to inject into so that's this here, so um you you need to do that. Another thing is that there is uninitialized is called twice and- and we talked through that in the previous blog post- that we featured, but just to mention that again, that's actually. I think something that we ran into with this site, the live.net site, where you can get on initialize called twice if you're, integrating blazer into exist.

A

That- and here explains why that is he talks through a few different options. You know that you can use caches, you can make a service singleton, and then he mentions too that this is. This is kind of an early in a hybrid scenario, and so he he does talk through that. This is something that it looks like you know, may continue to evolve so, but need to know that you can do that.

A

The final link I've got to share is just.netcomp, so we've got dotnetconf coming up november, 10th through 12th, uh looking forward to a lot of cool things getting announced there and, in addition, we're working on these virtual events.

A

So we've currently got 42 the magic number uh community events all over the world, so this is working with existing user groups and meetups and we're um helping them to do their own live streamed events, uh starting right after that, so we've got november 10th through 12th is dotnetconf and then right after that, we've got going all the way through january 31st, and these are it's really cool to see these pop up just all around the world.

A

People doing in you know in different languages, and so, if you know find one near you and if you are interested in running one, um you can click through the information is on here to host your own, so you just fill in a form and we give you the stuff and that's all I got all right so how'd you do it. What so this your blog scott goes back to is it. This is the one like this is your thousand.

B

April of 2002., okay,.

A

So this is dotnet.asp.net1, I mean this is migrated through all the different nets.

B

So it was originally started by clemens vasters uh and he worked at a company called new telegens. uh We may have mark and I may have bumped into some of the intelligence name spaces in the thing and it was written in web forms and asp.net one one, and then it was open source. I think we did it on sourceforge and then I registered adopt blog domain. I got omar shaheen involved, who is now a partner who runs all of onedrive?

B

I think he's actually a vp now um so and I'm on the show with you so omar and clemens have gone on to be you know, famous and powerful and a lot. You know lots of people use it during the peak of blogging and then you know, blogging has gotten a little bit more uh walled garden. People are in medium and things like that, but I know mark and I have enjoyed running our blogs and owning our own domains because we want to own our own space. When did you start.

C

Mark I started back around about 2005 2004 when I think it was live spaces. What did we have? I say we, I wasn't around right and so I had started blogging and then they yanked that or we yanked that I guess the royal. We ranked that and then ultimately I was looking around and saying. Well how do I avoid this ever happening again, because I started investing in a space that ultimately really wasn't mine, and so I said then I started looking around for various projects that I could join or just least just use.

C

I was just kind of a consumer at that point um and over the years, I've just kind of developed, an affinity for dust blog and.

D

At the time, I.

C

Was kind of really interested in learning more about asp.net web forms, because that's essentially the what I was kind of moving to from. I was a vb6 guy for a very long time, um and then I started to think about um you know I assumed asp.net web forms was the future. This was years ago. Obviously.

B

The the thing that was significant about that he mentioned windows live spaces. Is that windows live spaces, was windows or microsoft's attempt at being wordpress being hosted blogs? It was kind of a myspace hybrid, but it had extraordinarily ugly urls. If it had one feature it had nasty urls.

E

B

Passion for quality urls, the url is ui and blog at the time had urls that were pascal cased. So every single word is capitalized and then it had a dot aspx. It was also incredibly um flexible. I think you had dates in your urls at the time. Didn't you mark yeah like slash years last month? Yes, yes, I did for a while later went to just the title yeah. So dos blog has probably six six different kinds of ways.

B

You can use a url, um so one of the things that was always in the back of our minds beyond moving to the cloud beyond moving to.net was making sure that we don't break any urls. It's really really important, there's so much stuff in dust blog that is focused on not missing a not missing an http get. You know I mean it's got built-in google sitemap support. You know it's got seo. Support mark has added social support for twitter and reddit and facebook. We don't want to lose. Anyone who shows up to the website.

A

And I think that's the you know there's a whole like 80 20 on or and it's a lot more than that, like you can crank out a blog in net core in you know a few minutes, but doing that the migration and then also like you're, saying doing all those kind of social support, and you know like not missing any of the and the favicon and all that you know all those sorts of things. So this is the thing I I want.

B

To just kind of click on that for a second because, yes, making a blog with like public class blog public class comments for each blog and blogs, that's easy, making it themeable all the little micro formats, there's micro, summary formats and rss and rsd and wlwlw comments and adam all of these things that really make you fit into a blog ecosystem.

B

That stuff all needs to get done and dashboard. Does it.

A

Do you, so how did how do you want to go through this? Do you want to talk about the process of updating or you want to show off some of the code or.

B

Well, let me give a little context and then maybe mark can talk about it and then he can share his as well so bring up my um my screen here for me, john yep, so I think bar I'm I'd be interested in whether mark has a similar architecture, but I've actually got three sites. So the home screen is a tiny, little asp.net core razer pages site, and it was the first thing that I updated to dot net core. It is literally just a home page, it pulls from the rss feed. So this is not.

B

This is the blog content, but I'm literally calling back to myself and getting an rss feed here. It's got where I'm speaking uh in podcasts and books. It's brochure where it also has a section on about the podcast link and speaking. So this is a mini site. It is not the blog and that's kind of unique, because if I look here, flash about is part of this main site. So this hanselman maine hanselman speaking, is not its own site.

B

It's just a subdirectory underhandsman.com, but once we hit slash blog, that is its own app all right. I think we may have lost mark.

F

Oop here in just a sec.

B

Just hand your back.

F

All right, so here's here's mark's blog. What are we looking at here mark right, so this is my.

C

Kind of homepage, really, what I was trying to accomplish here is um dustbug, was really or is very good at themes. You've been able to kind of choose what flavor you want to to have. So essentially, what I wanted to do was um build a system that allowed me to kind of I kind of like to change my blog theme every two years, I'm just weird like that, but essentially what I wanted to do here is be able to make it really accessible and easy. So um this is my home page.

C

This is the this is actually isn't the the source or the root of the blog um okay. You can actually go now to the kind of blog, and that really is where dos blog starts. So this is this is the point here. Where does blog starts now.

D

C

Gosh blog or is that a tiny mini site? That's just a tidy site. That's nice.

B

So he and I share that pattern.

C

Yeah um so now we're kind of in dust blog proper- and I themed my front page to kind of have this kind of card looking scenario here. um But if you kind of look click into each individual page, I kind of have a different theme here. This is like slightly different stuff to the what was available for from das blog.

C

But essentially I can have a theme for my front page, a theme for my individual blog post and then kind of all the other things that dust blog had was which is cast set of categories um for each of your your posts and then an archive kind of listing everything by month and year. um So um and then, obviously, the rss feed, which we made available.

C

All these kind of things were all available. If you can kind of look if you can hit f12 for just for a second and let's look kind of look at that head.

C

Here even the elements hit elements I think, and then there's a ton of stuff in that head kind of that that kind of dust blog was kind of doing and providing for us here. So we had to kind of pull this data in there's a information about your site and underlying all this kind of data are basically three or four config files is the way das plug. Does it, and so I just wanted to continue that theme.

C

So when we look at the project itself, um you have a bunch of configs that can so I'm taking a little bit of information now from net core and the way your kind of ui works in net core and using configuration files for environments and stuff like that.

E

B

I found something to be really really useful and kind of innovative because- and I wrote a blog post about it actually today, I don't know if you saw uh mark that I appreciated what you did here, which is, if there's a hosting environment, we'll use it otherwise we'll just use dot and then you've got your standard config files, but these are all kind of non-standard config files. These are dos blog specific files and we can name us an environment. Whatever we want, we could have pest or cloud I could make.

B

You know I you know site.cloud.config.

B

If it made me happy dust blog, doesn't care I'll share a link to that in the comments that is actually right here as well on the it's actually on the on the home page right now- and I want to point out both on my blog, the uh what they call kebab casing and mark has that as well on his we pick one of his.

C

Looks like a shish kebab and and just like the old dust blog you can. You can go with a plus sign if you want to there's some variations on this right.

B

Right clusters or hyphens or whatever so that's actually brings up a good point if we go out here and we search for something search for hanselman mark downing if we find a blog post. So here we see that a search engine has already brought in and noticed that I've changed the url style.

B

Okay, here's another one, and if we try to find an older thing.

B

Here we go. Let's look at this.

E

Url here so that's.

B

The web form style one right yeah if we grab that I'm actually bring it in here and copy paste it and do the f12 thing just to make sure it's clear. What's going on, okay,.

E

So I'm gonna clear that there we go.

B

E

B

Yeah, the original one is now permanent, redirect and eventually the the search engines will notice that- and that's just super super super important to be able to do that because both of us have you know 15 20 years of of content, and you can't just say: please update your links. That would be right right. Okay,.

A

So you talked about the url structure and why it's important? Can you show us how you did that like? How do you.

B

A

Those redirects.

B

So I did a blog post about that a couple days ago.

B

Oh, don't ever break a url if you help it and it was kind of funny because I did a blog post back in 2017 called urls or ui and it had an aspx extension in it, and the people at hacker news were rather mean about it.

B

They were like you know. Who is this preachy person who is going and telling us about his ui? You know how important urls are when you have this thing here. You know, and it's not really awesome, because it you know asp.net has supported extension-less urls for a long period of time.

B

So what mark has done here is we've got kind of two layers, there's the and correct me if I'm wrong here mark, because I want to talk for you, but there's the startup.cs redirections, which are the standard formats we can use here and then outside before you ever get into the blog. I can use an xml file to do redirection, optionally,.

C

Yeah exactly so, we yeah we have the ias kind of rerouting kind of system that you can plug into um dust into dust plug and say. Essentially um this would be equivalent to what you would do previously with iis, except you know you can kind of plug it into as part of the middleware of net core right, and so now, if you have other urls that were really important to you that didn't quite fit the 95 of the use cases that I assumed people converting might want to use.

C

You can go ahead and add your own.

E

B

So there is an incredibly old format. That is probably I think we only had this for two or three years you may have actually did your block have these in 2005 nope, no, no yeah, so it was permalink.aspx question mark good equals and then literally we were running around with good. It was just a nightmare, but but but here's what's interesting. So if we look at if I'll go, look at the code that mark wrote but he's got a post controller that takes a guide.

B

So I can map the funky old format to the new one and the way I watch this- and this is really exciting- is I've got it in azure?

B

I can go and see failed requests and don't be sad like there are failed requests all the time in the world. It's not necessarily a failure of your blog. So I go here into application. Insights and I say: okay, look! There's a 404 is anything here interesting now here you go that might be a redirect. I could fix right, maybe someone's having trouble with the archives there.

B

um I've fixed most of our issues, there's a couple of missing images: I'm not seeing any blog posts that I can fix, but for a while I was seeing people coming in with this old style.

B

I talked to mark and he said well, hey I've got this guide one and if we go and look at that in the code here, I hit ctrl t and type in post controller.

B

And here we've got post with a guide and he's got get blog post by good, and then we have a little conversation in the in the chat there. So what's nice about this, is that mark doesn't care about these because he doesn't have those out in the in google, but I do, and dustbog is configurable enough- that I can put these redirects that I want in my own file here- and this is interesting- and this might be important to point out for the folks that are watching.

B

This is an iis style of redirects, but there is no iis involved. This is super important to point out. Iis made this format many many years ago. This is a a thing that is read in by some middleware.

B

I think we added.

E

A

So that's the rewrite middleware and then that handles support for a few different formats. There's is rewrite and then.

B

Yeah, I guess we could do that. Couldn't we like yeah, if you prefer apache for your middleware rewriting needs, you can do that.

A

Nice, okay, so so you show how do you find out? You showed there that you've got the um logging? Do you you also? I saw, as you were, showing code there's also like health checks and things like that. How important were health checks and testing, and things like that, as you were doing this update well, so this.

B

One was a: uh I was finding out that I was I I put in a ping application. I don't know if you use pingdom mark or anything like that, you have any kind of like uptime checkers. No sorry, I basically went to a third party site and said: hey ping, my website every few minutes.

B

Well, it turned out. I was pinging it every five seconds and it was doing a get and loading the home page, which is like you know, 500k or something or a meg, and I'm thinking to myself. I don't want to pay the 30 gigs a month or whatever to have.

B

You tell me that I'm okay, so a health check, is an asp.net ism where you go like that and it just returns healthy or unhealthy, or if it comes back with nothing, then you have an issue and health checks are great because you can go and look at other aspects of what's wrong with the blog and then mark made a thing called the site repairer nice.

B

It's basically like goes through and looks for directories that need to exist. You know all the little things that you might forget that would cause a dos blog user to be unhappy, so the site repairer runs on startup and makes sure that these different directories exist and that they're ready to go and then the health I haven't yet done it. But the health map could integrate into that and basically look for a bunch of files and ensure that they are in fact there and healthy.

A

So that's, I guess a good time to point out that there's no actually there's no backing database. It's all file based right.

B

Yeah, I think this is a thing that makes dust blog, unique and special other thing. Other people feel that this is uh nightmare fuel. What do you think mark? I.

C

It was why not.

B

F

C

Chose duskblog actually over other alternatives. To be honest, I felt that the the closest thing to be as close to my writing as possible to look to to not have an opportunity to lose stuff again. I needed it in a format that didn't care about who produced it or who was going to subsequently consume it. So a text file is the very definition of that thing. Right um so for me, it was. I had kind of been hurt so badly that I was never going to go down.

C

The road of you put this in a proprietary format for me, and I have to figure out how to to pull that data out from whatever system you've created. So so for me, xml and just the text based uh options were were it for me.

B

Yeah having having that sense of it's just a text file was at the time pre-markdown keep in mind. Markdown hasn't been invented at this point gave us a sense of comfort because nobody wants to have some binary sqlite file, that their files are trapped in and it's this blob.

B

So I have zip files that are backups of my blog and that that makes me comfortable and moving the goal for this. This migration was excuse me that I would take my existing blog, which was hosted on bare metal, and I would just copy the content folder over to mark's version, and it would just work and for the most part it did like it. Eighty percent right, which actually brings us to I think, discussing the project structure and how mark how you moved it to net core and what was hard and what.

C

Wasn't yes, so fundamentally that the new intelligence dust block runtime is really just a copy of what was ever was started when scott and clemens and isuzu omar started this whole project, that is to suggest these kind of raw types. Some of these are collections right, some of these kind of go back some so many years to to iterations of of objects and types that we think about when we think about.net 2.0 or net 1.1.

C

So I pretty much left that, as is part of my, I guess personal philosophy is that I hate reinventing things that are working very, very well, and especially, if it's something I trust, um I wanted to kind of keep that trust as best I can. However, there are certain things that we felt hey. These have been reinvented for us and we really don't have to rely on something, as as that would lock us into the windows ecosystem.

C

So things like there was a a a specific version of how we handle time zones and time that was.

D

C

This project that we took that out and replaced it with know the time, I'm not sure if I did it in idiomatic fashion, but I did something to. I essentially said that's replaceable by something that is solid, that the community realizes.

C

um So this whole kind of project really you'll see object, object, collection and all variations of that going through all this thing, yeah. So between that, though, I did because I didn't want to necessarily deal with that at the layer that is the ui layer which is going to be brand new. There is kind of like a middle section.

C

We refer to as the manager section and the manager section essentially says I will deal with the old and transform it into new, which the ui side will take on and and so that allowed me to kind of start thinking about dependency injection, which is kind of more in line with modern themes um and allowed me to kind of disregard asp.net web forms, which was kind of mostly dealing with static objects that kind of existed everywhere.

C

In essence, um now I can kind of essentially above the manager line you you are as contemporary and as new as possible below. We rely on the old because it works and because we don't have to change it.

B

And that that's almost like a like a view like a like a document view model right, because there's the core runtime idea of what an entry looks like which may or may not have everything that needs to be displayed and then there's the entry view that that the the front end needs to look like, and it's worth pointing out that this is a was a web forms application.

B

So that's original equipment. These are ports and a lot of you know new code from mark that are all dotnet standard. How did we move a a a web forms? Application forward, dodge blog as old as it was, was actually pretty well factored because it fed object collections into web forms.

B

So if I go and look at a theme which is, I think at the time, one of dos blog's most innovative things.

B

Let's look at like uh the blog for a layout, so here's here's a layout. You know you've got your nav bar and different stuff like this. Okay.

B

What what I think to mark's credit, but he did is he took what used to be web forms controls and turn them into tag helpers? Oh, no! So, for every web forms control that existed, there is a tag helper parallel. So literally all I did was take my themes.

B

Here's one of my themes that was done by a designer that I hired named jin yang and jin yang was actually one of the original designers at stack overflow, and I used to do things like this. This is old dos blog code using a custom macro that we did so I don't know mark when you had the epiphany, but you started you. You figured out that I should write tag helpers for these.

C

Yeah absolutely yeah. There was a bunch of uh um uh community kind of effort around talking about tag helpers at the time and I was trying to figure out what things would make it easy for others. If you know I knew I could figure it out, but what would make it really compelling and easy for others, people to to make a theme right, and so we needed this com. We needed something that we could. Somebody could create we kind of settled on razer as being the viewing kind of mechanism, because it just made sense.

C

It was there was obvious, um and then these lightweight tag, helpers, um just being able to drop them into a particular context, would really be helpful. So yeah right now, um scott showing off the um like. A blog item summary. So this would be essentially what I showed is with a single card on my summary page, and I can define that right here, and so I'm defining things like the list of categories. So I may have a list I could with this particular um with the post categories list box.

C

I could actually say I want it to become a separated or semicolon separated or whatever I wanted. I could pass in a bit of data that essentially exists as a separator, and then we have post title. You can pass passing things like styles to them um and it will look at your entry and say: oh, I see the title and I can essentially pass a style.

C

So all the way I was just kind of thinking about the ways in which people want to interact, interact with a usable component of what kind of information you might want to pass to it.

B

The other thing that was really significant was there's, there's an opinionated style here. Mark I mean you kept with clemen's idea of a layout has a certain number of required things like you need a bait, you need a blog item and you need a layout and that's basically it.

B

But if you want to override the behavior of something you want to make something look different, then you just add them. So, for example, you see that this theme has five razor pages. My theme has like 15 or 20 right, so it does that by falling back right, it uses the the asp.net mvc style of shared views.

B

So if you don't override a view, you get a free one and if you want a different view, you just make one and then it'll just pick up yours.

C

Yeah, ultimately, we wanted to essentially the the list. The order in which it looks for an item is defined right at the start, during your startup and we can say, okay, we've got another location where you can potentially find a a razor page and go here first, and so, essentially you get to override anything. So every essentially everything is overrideable in the entire site.

B

Yep exactly that's.

A

That's such a nice pattern, the whole kind of like there's something that's going to work by default, but you can override it. I know that's something like, for instance, the authentication views in uh and asp.net core have done recently, and you know that kind of like it'll work out of the box or you can drop in and override more things. If you want.

B

There's a couple of hacks here that I'm having trouble with that maybe damien who is in the chat. um Oh someone said that they can trust.net to run for a decade, yeah.

A

Try to well that I mean this is a huge deal, and I think this is a big point and a part of why, like enterprises and stuffus.net is, is um it's it's easy to go and go out on medium or dev2 and grab. The latest javascript framework can spin up your blog, but it's it's hard to evolve technology over decades and keep it running and know it's going to work and- and that is a really important value for net in general. So.

B

Oh, and actually speaking, of like keeping it up to date and stuff, one of the things that damien edwards helped us with is, if you go to my blog and you go all the way down at the bottom, you can see the version of version of.net the commit that I built from and the build itself. So I can go and click on those, and I can see the actual code in in github that caused that build to occur.

B

Now. I'm logged in at work right now, but what I'll do is I'll go down here and I'll say right, click open as personal, because I have two different. I have my work and my personal. So right click open is personal. I.

A

C

That I'm constantly jumping there's the build.

B

In in the pipeline as well now, damien will complain that I'm on dot net 3. 1.8 and not point nine, but this one is.

B

I need to go and figure out why the uh the in that weird because remember, I have multiple pages right, there's the blog, the podcast and the home page.

B

For some reason, the the new sdk is picking up this runtime here, but I'm not I'm not I'm off by dot. One on my.

D

B

On my home, but but again when the builds happen, uh I mean I'm. Actually I pick these up because if we go back to our pipeline.

B

In the uh and that this is using azure pipelines, although you could certainly use uh github actions if it makes you happy we're pulling in the latest dotnet sdk right there you're saying update damian but you're not on this episode. So you don't get damon join right in join right in and come and tell me how to get this updated.

F

We'll do it live.

A

Let's do it now um so have you tested that you've got net 318 319? Have you have you tested with net5? I've done so.

C

Not and sorry go ahead, I've done some preliminary testing, nothing solid. I am I I should we should and we should we absolutely should. I was just um with scott moving. I was like. I don't want any changes to this water right now.

B

But I would say, though, that mark and I had conversations about what our goal was and we are kind of lts people.

B

I I don't know if we have the energy mark to be updating to the latest thing all the time I feel comforted that I'm on an lts build and that I can easily uh get it out. Hey it's damian edwards.

B

Look what happened there! Do you want to debunk this demo.

G

My ears were burning.

B

So here's the deal the blog is on 318.

D

That's one extra version from where it was a couple days ago. If I recall.

B

I know because you told me to.

D

B

And the home page is on 319 right, okay and they both build in devops.

B

So there's two things there's the website. I mean this is all my stuff, but here's the website. Okay, this is the main one. Okay and here's the pipeline for the main one.

D

This is the one that is up to date right and this one is not using the yaml style of things.

B

D

The version hard coded in this one for some reason why.

B

Because I don't know how to float versions in this one, let's.

D

See the little eye, if you hover over the little eye there, it tells you how to do.

G

D

There you go dot x, just dot x, so just remove the dot 403 and put dot x.

B

Okay, save and queue.

D

So you've got a pipeline using the original sort of wizard style and then you've got one. That's the yaml style.

B

Sorry so here we are so we're gonna build. This is the home page of enhancement.com yeah in production, because that's how we do things. Oh.

D

Yeah all right.

B

D

Are self-contained deployments? Which is why we have to fix this right? Because, if you're running a framework dependent deployment, you will get patched as soon as the underlying machines.

B

Roll effectively so.

D

B

The time that we started this process, I felt more comfortable with self-contained. I felt like it gave me a sense of control and I felt like I could get the latest version on azure quicker than that azure could yep absolutely. I understand that that may change in the future.

A

B

While it's doing this.

A

And to explain so there's there's different deployment models. You can do self-contained, which brings its own.net framework yeah with or.net core with it and then there's the framework dependent, which is what's the latest on the machine where you depend on machine patching and all that that's.

D

Right and in this case, when we say framework, um obviously, unfortunately in our ecosystem, we have a bunch of words that are incredibly overloaded, but when we say framework in this case, there's actually two so because this is an asp.net core app at the bottom of the pyramid, there's the.net core shared framework and then on top of that, there's the asp.net core shared framework and then sitting on top of that would just be your application files, your nuget packages, uh whatever assemblies that you reference, etc, etc in a self-contained application.

D

The underlying frameworks that you refer to with a framework reference which is often implied you, don't see it in your project file, it's just there as a result of whatever sdk you target. um They, those assemblies, get copied into your output folder as well plus the native code that actually bootstraps.net core itself, and that's why it's a self-contained app in don f5. We now have improved support for not only self-contained apps but single exe, single executable apps, um along with application linking um or trimming depending on what what uh pylons you kind of prefer.

D

um And so not only can you do a self-contained. That is a single executable one file for all the you know, dynamic stuff. Your static files still remain separate for a web application, but then you can trim it. You can run it through the the linker, which is part of the sdk, and this technology is still in preview, but you can kind of turn up the lincoln knob to say yeah. I really want to link out as much code as possible.

D

Not only will it trim assemblies that it figures out, you don't use it'll, go into the il and literally rip out your methods and properties and things that you don't use as well. Now that can cause problems, which is why it's a.

G

D

And sometimes you have to give it a little bit of extra information because of the dynamic nature of net, but we've seen some customers already using this to great effect to very quickly either half the size of their self-contained applications, whether they're windows desktop apps, using winforms or wpf, or asp.net. Core apps like this um or even further than you know, half if they're able to tweak it down and their code is fact in such a way that the static analyzer and the linker can figure out what is safe and what isn't uh to remove.

D

A

D

A

Scott, I saw um uh james newton king just over the past weekend, had something where he he was talking about, dialing down on his grpc and and putting those hints in and getting some some nice. um You know like, like you're, saying, like just dialing, that down uh even further, which is really cool right.

D

So yeah, so we did a bunch of work, admittedly late, in.net 5 to utilize some new features which allow you to annotate types uh with attributes, uh especially for framework authors, so that they can instruct the the the linker about how specific type information is used. You know within the body of a method or within a type itself, so that, even if, when looking at that from the outside as a tool, you might say- oh well, you know this code isn't used. The type that's passed in is never referred to.

D

That code might be doing something dynamic via reflection or code generation or whatever it might be at runtime, and so you can annotate that and say no, no, no linker like just hands off like this is actually needed. You can't you may not be able to determine that, but I actually need this. So we went and annotated a whole bunch of asp.net core uh so that you can more aggressively trim the asp.net core itself um and then, where you know, there's been a blog post about this and there'll be further documentation to help library.

D

Authors do similar things so that more frameworks are just you know, safe by default. To turn on the more aggressive linking behavior go. Scott.

B

First question so so mark and I made the yamo version for the blog and floated the sdk version.

B

B

Published the build artifact and we get as a self-contained and we get.

D

Three one eight eight, that's interesting: are they both on linux or and or windows, or are they different? So mine is on linux? Okay, marx is on windows and you get the same result or different results.

B

Oh, that's a good question. Do you know what version you're running on mark.

H

B

I'm not sure if he's lit up right, the the the footer as I did so.

D

The other thing to check would be uh the log for your build specifically that task. The use.net task should emit some log messages about how it acquires the sdk, and it should tell you which version it found based on the wild card that you set, and we should cross-reference that version with whatever the latest version is.

B

Do you want to share your screen and look at your uh build yeah I built on thursday, which was a week after 319 came out, but this this build did not pick up 319.

D

So look at what's the sdk version because we need to use the decoder ring to figure out which sdk version came with 319.

B

So I'm here yep and I do a job and we look at the 403.

D

Which is what it should be. That's what it is yeah so 403 sdk is the release that came with the 319 update.

D

And you can tell that for folks who don't know you can tell that by uh going to dot.net clicking on download and then going to all downloads and then you'll get a table.

B

Oh, that's interesting. Look at this.

D

Whoa, what is this uh that's a new line? Why is it emitting that's interesting.

D

That might just be a bug, in our very simplistic logic, to capture the build info.

B

I think the build info file was created.

B

Not it was not in, I think, that's a coincidence. Yeah.

D

B

Intended to show the version of net which is picked up from the from the environment, that's.

D

B

That build info is created here.

B

And that's just the build id. So that's a coincidence. Okay, that the build id is.

D

Happens to be a similar, looking number yeah yeah, so.

E

Just remind you, which one.

D

Of your sites, you said your home page, your main site is on the latest version or isn't yes, it is, it is, and it's the one that's using the older style, devops windows.

G

D

Pipeline but the newer one, which is on the linux yaml pipeline, is the one that isn't and.

B

The old style one builds on windows right, uh yeah, it's built on windows deployed onto linux. This is running on linux and it's on 319 and when you texted me yesterday and said, update it updated in minutes.

B

Okay, the blog is on 318, but was built with the latest sdk.

D

And if we go back to the only thing, I would check, because I've got a couple of my own sites, obviously running on similar things. I haven't seen this problem and I'm using the yaml and I'm building on linux and deploying the linux as well. It would be like the version of the tasks and things but again like everything here is fine. It's use.net hat too you're using the right wildcard. Did you look at the log? Did we? You did look at the log and it said it was downloading 403 yep.

B

D

So the only other thing then would be to I mean it's weird, but to check your it said right here.

D

Okay, so just wait a second! Let's make sure we read the rest of it.

B

And it's on ubuntu 18, which isn't. This is not awesome.

D

Then it says successfully installed so then the other thing would be it. The that sdk will then determine what version to use based on your project file, uh which I'm assuming the only information in there you have is the tfm like I'm assuming you're, not overwriting any of the other properties, a good point, so that is here.

C

Just as fy my my windows and linux both seem to be saying three one: four, oh three as well.

B

Three one: what 403 for the sdk? Okay, so you're on the same? Yes yep and that's the yep up there, so yeah we're not doing anything wrong.

D

Let's have a look, I'm just scanning the other properties.

G

Oh okay: well, I have to go. Have lunch.

B

But the result of all of this was we ran this on staging for some months. Didn't we mark, and uh I started to feel that my existing website was creaky and I called mark in a panic last week, and I said I don't think it's going to last the weekend and he was very, very kind and we spent, I don't know what we spent about two hours.

B

And uh perf is better: we didn't break any seo, um get all the benefits of um of azure, which is really nice, backups and uh diagnostics. I made this cool dashboard.

B

The curf is just ridiculous, like it's not even touching two percent three percent. I do have a long page load time and it's basically all javascript.

B

Oh nels is asking if there's a global, json good answer.

D

Good question: let's see that might be it right there, the agent itself and devops obviously has pre-installed sdks and that's why there was a message saying it didn't find 403 in the cache, which means the agent image hasn't been updated to 403. Yet you have a task that acquires 403. So that's the one that it puts in the effectively.

G

D

Path for your build, but if you have a global json, uh it'll evaluate that yep. No global jason.

I

D

Sorry not sure we'd have to do some more details.

B

Around a little later, but it's been.

D

B

It stays up, um I haven't, had any issues at all. I think we might have some stuff around log files taking up some space. We make quite a bit of log files, but I'm learning about the new logging system that dust blog core has but yeah. I would say in the three weeks that it has been up, it has worked out very very nicely and it sits behind an azure front door.

B

So, at the very very beginning of this conversation for those who were there, we pointed out that the main page is different from the slash blog and that is because azure front door routes.

A

Yeah, so you pointed out, it's actually like three different mini sites and they're all kind of wired here or two different yep.

D

Exactly right, so the latency on the site seems to be much lower. Now, like I, I opened the dev tools. Yesterday I turned off the cache and I hit controller 5 a bunch of times and it was just instant every single time. All the images also come.

B

Off I, I did a little silly thing that mark has teased me about gently which.

D

B

Working on- and it's not my greatest hour, um where is that um where'd we do that, was it blog page. It was that raw thing remember.

B

Oh, this, oh html raw. So this is just an experiment, but it ended up going into production, where I swap out all calls to my images for an azure cdn right and wow. That has really improved latency everywhere and it required nothing, and I can turn it off in one line. Now it's not awesome to be doing a search and replace or a string replace on every blog post on every hit right.

B

So that's a that's an artifact of the fact that dos blog has these urls embedded um with absolute urls, and not relative ones, which is nice, are.

D

You doing any caching out of interest.

E

Do we do any caching, do we have any cash and.

D

I mean sort of, I don't mean setting cash headers, I'm assuming you're. Doing that I mean no I'm looking around. I think we had talked.

C

D

I think there is in the oh.

B

We do caching here we do caching in one space, okay,.

D

I

D

I

Okay, no, I think there is actually, if can you go to the home controller.

C

On controller yeah and check just to check the constructor of the home control to see if there's a memory, cache object, there.

B

ah Here you go so you're. Caching, the the database at the front page essentially yeah.

D

Okay, so I saw two caches, then we've got some code based caching here for the data that you retrieve from your xml files, essentially and then you've got a fragment cache using the cache tag helper, which didn't even have an expiry by the looks of it like it literally, would just cache forever, while the app is running because it was just varied by the various route values for the archive page. That's what I saw when you show yeah right.

B

Yeah, because there's software, that we don't really go back in time and update like april of 2007, so it'll get when the thing restarts, it'll get updated, got it cool, there's front page caching and that's about it. So I think there's a lot of opportunities for easy sprinkle around fragment caching opportunities.

A

Things like archives or.

B

And I know that the engine itself does some some pretty aggressive caching, because the engine is a singleton, but the thing that so they, the the deserialized object graph of all of the blog posts is um hashed, but the running of the razor pages happens multiple times right. But if you go and look at the actual blog itself, it's my vlog is quite large because it's like six thousand whatever so where's memory.

B

So you know I'm using probably a gig of gra a gig of ram, maybe a gig and a half so we're holding entries our our our our object in memory as a giant object graph got it when arguably, we should be storing html or something like that. Yeah yeah yeah, I mean, but it's it's fast fast, we're very happy with it very cool anything I missed mark.

I

No, I think you, I think, that's it.

A

That's a lot there well so, as you mentioned before, scott like this is something that's evolving over time and you you touched on a lot of different areas, and you know maybe even later, if you go, if you test out like.net5 migration or if you want to dig, you know people that are watching and chat. Let us know if there's some specific areas, you'd like to hear more about um that'd, be fun to to keep digging into this. So.

B

Yeah and people have been kind enough to- I made a github yeah see. This is another thing. That's happening see this here. This is an azure cdn thing. This person's saying this image can't be opened directly right and there it is.

B

So it's like: what do you do.

D

I mean if it's a cdn, it may have been transient. I mean those things happen.

B

Yeah it just kind of bums me out.

D

Cdn is you'll often because that's not plugged into your app insights, monitoring or anything right, so you won't see that as a 404 it'd be like somewhere on the edge. Someone didn't get an image and there's not you don't know about that.

D

A

All right, well good stuff- this is wonderful, yeah, nice, nice to have have mark on for the first time, have scott and surprise damian uh show up so while damien appears. So this is awesome, um so keep watching uh we've got shows now. Every tuesday wednesday, thursday we've also got dot net cough coming up soon. So a lot of good stuff- and I guess that's uh we'll wrap up there.

B

Yeah all right mark has been on before or will be on, there's a there's dump file analysis with uh mads christensen with the visually office hour, so you should go to dot net, live tv and check that out as well, and I just want to thank mark both I've done it privately, but I want to do it publicly for all this hard work to make dos blog uh live on into 2020 being able to run this thing in the cloud has been a dream and it's been a huge amount of anxiety of just wondering.

B

When is my blog gonna go down and then we're gonna have to move it and being able to have to move it without it actually dying in its previous location, uh has just lifted a weight off of me. So thank you mark for your hard work and for your.

C

B

It's been cool. Thank you.

A

Awesome all right well we'll wrap up there, then. So, thanks.

A

A

A

A