Jan 13

I like to use OWIN with Web API unfortunately Web API Help pages is MVC and actually doesn’t work first time with OWIN, so much so I asked a Stack Overflow question about it (which I ended up answering myself). You can get it working on IIS with minimal effort, but not on self host this is because MVC requires (pre vNext) System.Web.

At first I gave up and tried Swagger for my docs, but I came back to Web API Help Pages. What I like about Web API Help Pages is at it’s heart it’s just a set of Razor templates. And for me using Razor templates is about as easy as it gets. So I thought ‘How hard can it be to make Web API help pages work with self host?’ A quick Google revealed that Yao has already managed to get Web API Help Pages working on self host using T4 templates, so if I do something similar but using Razor I’m in business.

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Jul 21

During this series of posts I’m going to share with you how I work with WebApi. I’m going to share the steps with you so you understand exactly what is going on and the choices made. There of course is a GitHub repo you can folk and use in your own projects.

Being a consultant I have to create REST API’s (or as I like to say ‘RESTish API’s’*) a lot, I’m going to show you how I do it. When you create your WebApi project your first instinct might be to select the WebApi project template, I would resist doing it like that.

Not because there is anything wrong with using the templates, because there ins’t I’ve used both the WebApi and MVC templates as learning tools as well as for quick hacks. That said that’s what you should use them for – here are my reasons for saying that:

  • So much of the config is done for you that it can be difficult to understand what’s going on, what if you need to change the config or had a deployment issue would you be confident in making changes?
  • So many extra packages are added that you probably don’t need.
  • It’s not Owin backed.

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May 14

Earlier this year I posted about a pet project I’ve been working on DalSoft.RestClient which is a dynamic C# rest client.

I’ve now used it on a number of projects, and it works really for fluently accessing rest api’s (if I do say so myself). So I thought I’d do a quick post on a real life scenario. For a client of mine I’ve recently needed to integrate PushWoosh, so I thought I’d share some code to show how easy it would be to create a PushWoosh SDK with DalSoft.RestClient.

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Jan 26

Whenever I’ve wanted to create a SDK for my WebApi’s I’m surprised by the amount of bolierplate code you end up with. HttpClient made things easier for us, but you still end up wrapping HttpClient and passing generics around.

I wanted something between Simple.Data and angular’s $http service, the main driver was to make my tests as readable as possible. I’ve messed around with .NET 4 dynamic objects before, so I set about creating a dynamic wrapper around HttpClient and a fluent API I could re-use. It’s passed the rule of 3 as I’ve used it for multiple clients. A side note is that it should be trivial to generate DalSoft.RestClient code examples in your WebApi docs.

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Dec 05

Updated 26 Mar 2016 for Brunch 2.0

While working at OnTrees I was introduced to brunch by @_grayham and have used it on a couple of my own projects (more recently exploregiving.com). Brunch is an alternative front-end build system to Grunt or Gulp.

You can achieve the same thing with any of these front-end build systems. I’ve just found the brunch conventions and workflow very simple to work with. What closed it for me was how easy it was to add brunch to our continuous deployment pipeline.

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