I have recently started an internship in a big company (4.5k employees) which uses an Active Directory and have an intranet web app allowing them to handle all types of services, going from administration to user creation etc ... It was developped in 2004 and now they want to remake the whole application, well actually I have to make it. And kind of on my own, I am the only developer here.
I was thinking of developing an ASP.NET MVC 5 project to develop this application, do you think that is a good choice? Don't know many other design-patterns for this, and I found on the web that Active Directory is accessible using ASP.NET MVC, and everything seems compatible. The old project used a hand made architecture, which didn't respect any design-pattern and using mainly VBScript. I want to use C#, that's the only imperative I guess.
Thanks for your help, I hope this is clear, if not I will try to make it clearer :D
ASP .Net MVC seems to be a good choice. You can use ADAL for authentication and manage any kind of AD data. Here are some links:
Http://www.ianatkinson.net/computing/adcsharp.htm
But you must master ASP.Net MVC (Bootstrap / razor / ...)
Good luck !
Related
We are currently considering moving from ASP.NET MVC to Angular 5, mostly because it seems like the best and latest framework. However none of us seems to be able to come up with hard reasons on why Angular is better than MVC (Razor).
SPA vs MPA seems like different approaches with neither really being better - just better at different things.
Are there any resources/comparisons with hard benefits between the two?
Update: Almost 2 years after moving to Angular 4 (currently 7) I can say that it was a great decision. Angular makes it super easy to write quite complex front-end applications and the tooling around Angular itself, TypeScript, Karma + Jasmine (unit test frameworks) is fantastic. SPA is a huge step ahead of MPA in my opinion - we can finally have fluid web experience. I never really liked Razor and the whole mess around ajax/jquery, but I can comfortably say that I am really enjoying my time now! .NET CORE 3 + Angular 7 gives us everything we need!
To anyone thinking of taking the plunge, I would strongly recommend Angular (might as well start with 8 or 9, which is current at the time of writing this).
Happy to add more details if people want them :)
6 months on from moving from ASP.NET MVC to Angular 5 (now 6) and we are extremely happy with the decision. .NET core backend and Angular frontend is a fantastic combination. It is so much cleaner and easier to create re-usable, strongly-typed, testable and easy to modify UI components!
For anyone considering if it's worth taking the plunge - I would say a resounding 'yes'!
I don't have enough points to make a comment but thought the following might help you in making a decision.
Just to note that if you use Angular CLI (The default Angular project in Visual Studio) you will lose the ability to use razor within the HTML. Something you was able to do before Angular CLI.
I do like using Angular but miss having Razor to omit certain parts of the HTML, for example, if the user didn't have the necessary roles or permissions:
#if(User.IsInRole("Admin"))
{
}
You can hide the HTML using Angular of course, but having it completely removed from the HTML itself is preferable in my opinion.
I vote for an ASP.Net MVC Web Application in the cloud [Core or whichever] , and use of razor pages as needed. That is it. Case closed.
Even if the whole world runs after Angular , Aurelia, React, Node, Strawberry, Pistachio, butterscotch JS, I will not.
After all, JavaScript is spagetti and Angular is the Flying Spagetti Monster
based on personal experience and intuitive take.
Now please don't get started about mouse hover over page areas,
What I did found out about Angular vs MVC (Razor), I can work with both :-)
Authorization: One thing to make sure is that you don't have complex authorization schemes. On the backend its easy to do your authorization on pages with Razor (even more with Core). Its more difficult to handle authorization with Angular because you will have to do it (and keep in sync) on both sides: client and server. Example: One thing you want is hide everything a user is not allowed to do. If you have a simple webapp and use a Masterpage: show only the menu items a user is allowed to see. Thats a very easy task to do in Razor. It takes more time/effort to implement this in Angular.
Templates: Razor is extremely easy to use with templates. If you develop a website that must be used a number of times but with different layouts that can be done very easily with Razor.
Maintenance: With MVC you have one application. The frontend and backend are one. For maintenance you will have a Angular frontend and X Backend, so two. That seems more costly from installation, maintenance, etc. point. If you have a simple application I would say KISS: Keep It Simple Suckers.
One: In MVC the frontend and backend belong together. That can be good or bad. If you have one application with no dependencies on other things I think MVC is a good choice.
Future proof: Angular is NO W3C and NOT baked in the browser. Because of Future proof solutions there is a strong interest in Vanilla Javascript together with Web Components. With MVC you can use this technology. Read about Microsoft FAST Design. It works great with MVC.
SPA/MPA: Thats not a point anymore. An MPA can also be flicker-free with libraries like PJAX etc.
Speed: With MVC no wait time because Shit has to be loaded. Enough bad Angular websites already exists because loading takes ages.
...: After working with Angular 9 I don't get the point of Angular. I don't know why you should go from MVC to Angular. Visual Studio has great support for MVC and is much better as VS Code. From productivity point I can produce much faster code with MVC as with Angular. If you have multiple front ends that must connect to the same backend may be then I can see the point. But even then MVC can be moduled and even can dynamically load them.
htmx Wow, now we are talking! Yes this is what we want. Let Html take back control how pages are loaded. Think this is the way to go. Worked a sample with NodeJS and are very exited about it.
Update: I just did a nodejs/express/mongodb project and it beats it all. I am an expert mvc developer, but developing faster, better on a chromebook of 220e with vs code. now I know why it's so popular. and guess what? it's free. and guess what else? part of dotnet Core is based on nodejs. the console app is the same as a nodejs server. both you will have to put behind a proxy of IIS, Apache or NGINX.
One thing that I learnt during the comparison of MVC and Angular, among various factors, is that hosting MVC application requires a compute power container like Azure Web App, docker etc, while an Angular App can be deployed in any storage like Blob, CDN etc. When Angular is built, it gives a collection of javascript files, which are perfect candidate for storage container. They do not need compute power at all, which are the most costly resource in cloud world. CDN or Blob exposes Rest API endpoint to any of its underlying resource. So, the Angular will also be exposed as an API, which is all we want.
However, angular alone will not generate dynamic web pages. We need Web-Api at back-end to give the data. This can be achieved by a server-less solution (Function Apps, Logic Apps etc) or by containerization (Docker).
One downside that I personally found that the first time load of the Page in Angular is bit slow. After that it is really smooth.
All in all, I will vote for Angular/React and .Net Core in my future Web projects.
We released a WPF client server application this year . It has a client (with a few dlls ) and server on the server machine (with multiple dlls with most of our logic). The server side uses Entity Framework and the service between them is TCP /IP Windows communication foundation (WCF).
The client uses MS Prism with Mef for MVVM. The UI has a number of Datagrids for storing , saving data.
For WPF we have :
XAMl -> View Model -> Service Interface -> Server Side code -> DB
For ASP.NET , we expect to use the layers from Service Interface onwards as it is.
So , basically we need :
Website-> Logic for data handling on client Service Interface -> Server Side code -> DB
Unit testability is not a very major concern as our unit test coverage looks good on the server side (85 % covered).
I read up on ASP.NET MVC and found some tutorials that spoke about building whole applications on the MVC framework .
Our case we have more than half of the application built and only need the client side web UI with same data .
My question is : Should we go for ASP.NET Web forms or MVC ?
Web forms have native controls like GridView which can be used. MVC doesnt provide much native controls support . MVC covers the whole web app full stack. We only need the client UI website.
People around have recommended MVC since it is new and looks like the way forward but I am wondering if it would be overkill considering our requirements ( only need client). Would MVC force us to rework our whole layers even on the server side ? Will aSP.NET web forms not do this ? We want to be able to use WCF instead of doing any other http framework like webapi.
I know this question has been done to death with but these are some speicific requirements here. I also read up on porting WPF apps to Web but tat probably wont work out as we may have some fucntionalties different in the Web vs WPF.
Having worked with both MVC and Web Forms I would highly recommend going with MVC. In my opinion Web Forms is an antiquated pain-in-the ass that doesn't lend itself well to scaling or unit testing(which I know you said is not a huge concern).
Yes, Webforms has native controls like gridviews but you aren't missing out on much. These are good for very simple things but as soon as you add some complexity to your tabular data you're going to be pulling your hair out. What I'm trying to say is you can accomplish the same thing these built-in controls provide but with greater flexibility using simple tables or just plain old divs(and some css, of course).
I should also note that both MVC and web forms work just fine w/ WCF. You don't have to use WebApi if you're using MVC.
Lastly, I don't think there's an easy way of only providing "the client" piece of what your trying to accomplish with Microsoft technologies. If I understand your question correctly, you have a desktop application and now you want to provide a web-based equivalent UI. You're going to have to create a site using webforms or MVC to achieve that. However, you will be able to reuse your web services so you won't have to rewrite too much business logic.
You are making a small confusion. Since you have alredy a WCF(SOAP) backend service you will write only the UIClient, regardes of technology. You can do it even in Java.
Since you rewrite the desktop client, as a new web client you have to do it from scratch, and so should use ASP.MVC. You can find a lot of forums which can tell you why.
Web API is used, only if you want to create REST services in MVC. But you can build them also in WCF if you really need them.
The only good reason for ASP.NET, will the fact if you have developers which already know it, and you can save some money.
I just got a project to be build up from scratch. Its front end will ASP.Net and Backend is SQL 2008. The requirement is, the architecture of the app should be such so that we can have access to app from any computers(desktop, laptop, netbooks) as handheld devices as well like smartphones, PDA's, Tablets. Also it should be plugable in nature like FB and orkut. That is in future if the client needs to attach games or third party applications, then it should be plugged in without rewriting the entire thing again. Also client needs the entire web ajaxified either using the toolkits or JQuery.
I have prior experience of ASP.Net webforms applications with tiered arcitecture. So this time keeping his all needs, i am thinking of a web app with WCF Service. But i have no idea or experience about the pluggable architecture with SOA and MVC (all three). It seems if I implement all the stuffs, it will going to be a mamoth of codes. For pluggable arch I googled and found MEF on codeplex. So finally I came up with the following things :
ASP.Net MVC
MEF
JQuery
WCF
RESTful with AJAX
XML
Guys, i really need your help, I am unable to think how to place all these stuffs together. Or is there any other best alternative you can suggest for.
Also, there is one more requirement by the client is that he want the loose coupled code, that's reason i chosen MVC, the aspx page can only have the controls and required HTML, validation and other codes should be done in the Business Layer of the app.
it will be great help.
You should take a look at Orchard: it's an ASP.Net MVC CMS system that is very pluguable. You can add a lot of functionnalities through modules, and there are a lot of modules already implemented and accessible.
Even if you do not end up using Orchard itself, taking a good look at its architecture should be a very good starting point for your app, as Orchard responds to a lot of the same requirements you have, and as it is an open source project, you can get as much inspiration from it as you want.
I'm maintaining an application which currently is just a web service (built with WCF) and a database backend. The web service is built in layers with a linq-to-sql data access part with core functionality in an own assembly and on top of that the web service assembly which contains the WCF code. The core assembly also handles all business logic rules (very few actually).
The customer now wants a Web interface for the application instead of just accessing it through other applications which are consuming the web service. I'm quite lost on modern web application design, so I would like some advice on what architecture and frameworks to use for the web application. The web application will be using the same core assembly with business rules and the linq-to-sql data access layer as the web service.
Some concepts I've thought about are:
ASP.NET MVC (or MVC-2)
Webforms
AJAX controls - possibly leting the AJAX controls access the existing web service through JSON.
Are there any more concepts I should look into? Which one is the best for a fresh project?
The development tools are Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Developers targeting .NET 3.5. An upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Premium (or maybe even Ultimate) is possible if it gives any benefits.
Definitely dig into ASP.NET MVC2.
All of our projects are now being developed using ASP.NET MVC2. It's not just highly scalable. It's highly testable as well. Which leads to way better maintainable apps in the long term.
WebForms vs. MVC2 points - (speaking out of experience):
Scalability:
In our company we had a lot of applications using WebForms which then were updated and changed by us as needed by our customers.
I think your customer will be requesting more changes on the application in near future. Making calls to other services, and maybe you'll have to rework parts of the final product to match their wishes.
And with the upcoming Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure platform you'll probably need to keep up with your code.
ASP.NET MVC absolutely supports the concept of being able to scale up your application any time you want.
I remember one of our customers walking up on me asking me for an extension for their app (they have a member management system) and the feature would contain something like a link to export the current view as a csv file so they could do office stuff with it (mostly serial letters).
It wasn't really a big problem setting that feature up. (took around 2 hours including writing tests) - let's go to tests:
Testability:
Using WebForms we didn't really have much interest writing tests because it was a pure pain to do so.
I remember writing some tests to have at least some proofs but let's drop that topic.. (:p)
We had tests for our custom classes but we couldn't really test all the EventHandlers within the WebForms.
Our CodeBase is way cleaner and saver to use thanks to this testable environment. I just check out some of the code, modify it, run all the tests and: Oh, it broke on strange behavior! - Let's fix that again. Earlier, I remember sitting with my co-worker debugging and trying to find those bugs for hours.
With ASP.NET MVC2 we are now lacking tests!
We ask all kinds of people (even the non-Web ones) to provide test-cases we could feed into our TestSuite.
And yeah, there are some AJAX-Controls too:
AJAXability:
You asked about AJAX Controls and in conjunction with ASP.NET MVC I highly recommend you to check out Telerik ASP.NET MVC UI Controls.
If that isn't something for you, we also make extensive use of jQuery and jQuery UI
With ASP.NET MVC and the HTML Views, those libraries aren't just a pleasure to use, they just look amazingly beautiful.
There is no random-html-tag-id-value autogeneration anymore!
But what I like most is: You can finally really re-use your code again.
There is so much more to those frameworks than just that, there is the T4 templating system. Auto-Scaffolding for your ViewModels / DomainModels with the Html.EditorFor() method and of course there is a great and easy way to use the IoC and DI paradigms.
Assuming that you have asked the question with mostly .NET Framework related tags, you'll probably stick with it.
Just to keep the post complete, there are also other frameworks that are just as good (or even better):
Ruby on Rails
Django
CakePHP
And many many more!
There's also DynamicData which may be appropriate if you need simple CRUD access to your data.
The Web Service Software Factory (WSSF) might come in handy in your situation.
This will allow you to define your contracts (XML entity returned (if XML you choose), etc.) while designing the server/client communication using WCF (or standard Web Service communication protocol).
WSSF favors either ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET MVP. A simple example of the MVP architecture is shown here, plus this article.
As for me, I often come with a hybrid-like architecture using a bit of both MVC and MVP, as both have different strong points which combined together fill each other's improvement points.
I'd also recommend looking into Silverlight.
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/
Just my opinion to use MVC on Client sites and WebForms inside administration pages(site)
I'm currently working on a project that has a sizable amount of both client and web code. The client code is written in C# and the web piece is written in PHP. Maintaining consistency between the two worlds is becoming cumbersome, and I want to consolidate the web code to .Net.
The issue is that I hate web development in ASP.Net Web Forms. I want something as raw as PHP, just using C# instead. I've read a little about ASP.Net MVC, but it looks like it abstracts too much of the request logic for my liking.
Does anyone know of a lightweight way to allow C# + .Net to handle web requests? Should I be looking more closely at MVC?
Update: I went with ASP.Net MVC and I've been very pleased so far.
If you're looking to get away from ASP.NET Web Forms, the I recommend ASP.NET MVC with a custom view engine (like Spark, or NHaml). This will give you the consolidation your looking for and allow you to avoid most of the Web Forms that your not happy with.
AFAIK, to do .NET web development, you are going to have to interact with ASP.NET in some form or another, but the custom view engines in MVC could be exactly the abstraction your looking for.
It is now possible to use a software stack completely separate to IIS and ASP.Net using Kyak, Nancy and Gate.
http://bvanderveen.com/a/gate-0.1.0/
You might want to check out Kayak, which is, to my knowledge, the only standalone .NET web development framework that's not ASP.NET.
Caveat: Kayak's request handling implementation is not the best, so there may be performance or scaling issues. I can't say for sure -- I've only read it, not run it.
Edit: I've taken another look at the source code, and it looks like they've rewritten a significant portion of their server code, and in doing so fixed the major issues. Performance probably won't be a problem.
MVC.NET is open source, so you can make it do what you want. It is a framework that is overrideable, extensible, etc. I'd look closer at it. It works great for me and I've come from a background of CGI, Struts and Webwork. I love it.
In my opinion nothing is more lightweight than the combination of NancyFX (http://nancyfx.org/) with Dapper (https://github.com/SamSaffron/dapper-dot-net) for data access.
NancyFX can be hosted within ASP.NET, WCF, Azure, OWIN-compatible environments, Umbraco or you can write your own host.
Read also these articles:
http://theothersideofcode.com/lightweight-development-in-dot-net-nancy
http://theothersideofcode.com/lightweight-data-access-in-dot-net-massive
I also suggest you to TinyIoC (https://github.com/grumpydev/TinyIoC) for decouple your application layers.
Regards,
Giacomo
You should look into the IHttpHandler and IHttpModule interfaces. These are the foundations for ASP.NET WebForms. Brad Wilson has a good intro to the former.
In the bad days when WebForms was the way to do ASP.NET development I was writing my own simple MVC framework with these interfaces. The bit I struggled with at the time was the View engine but now there are a number of these.
You take a closer look at ASP.NET MVC since the source is available and decide for yourself. It may be that you want to change some of the conventions used rather than the whole framework.