Getting Started

This document is aimed to create and run an ASP.NET Zero based project in just 5 minutes. It's assumed that you already purchased and created your ASP.NET Zero account.

Create Your Project

Select ASP.NET Core & Angular as Project Type and fill other required fields. Your project will be ready in one minute. When you open the downloaded zip file, you will see two folders:

aspnet-core folder contains the entire app. Angular UI application is placed under aspnet-core/src/*.Web.Host folder which is configured to work with the angular-cli. Server side API app (*.Web.Host) is an ASP.NET Core solution and configured to work with Visual Studio.

Pre Requirements

Visual Studio 2017 (v15.9.0+) (for backend ASP.NET Core application)
Node.js 6.9+ with NPM 3.10+
Yarn

ASP.NET Core Application

When you open the server side solution (*.Web.sln) using Visual Studio 2017+, you will see the solution structure as below:

If you want to work on only Xamarin project, open *.Mobile.sln solution. If you want to work on both of Xamarin and Web projects, open *.All.sln solution.

Right click the .Web.Host project and select "Set as StartUp project". Then build the solution. It may take a longer time during the first build since all nuget packages will be restored.

Database

Connection String

Open appsettings.json in .Web.Host project and change the Default connection string if you want:

"ConnectionStrings": {
    "Default": "Server=localhost; Database=PhoneBookDemoDb; Trusted_Connection=True;"
}

Migrations

We have two options to create and migrate database to the latest version.

ASP.NET Zero Migrator Application

ASP.NET Zero solution includes a .Migrator (like Acme.PhoneBookDemo.Migrator) project in the server side solution. You can run this tool for database migrations on development and production (see migrator docs for more information).

Entity Framework Migration Command

You can also use Entity Framework Core's built-in tools for migrations. Open Package Manager Console in Visual Studio, set *.EntityFrameworkCore as the Default Project and run the Update-Database command as shown below:

This command will create your database. Initial data will be inserted when you run the *.Web.Host project. You can open SQL Server Management Studio to check if database is created:

You can use EF console commands for development and Migrator.exe for production. But notice that; Migrator.exe supports running migrations in multiple databases at once, which can be useful in development/production for multi tenant applications.

Configure Multi-Tenancy

ASP.NET Zero supports multi-tenant and single-tenant applications. Multi-tenancy is enabled by default. If you don't have an idea about multi-tenancy, you can read it on wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy. If you don't want to create a multi-tenant application, you can disable it by setting PhoneBookDemoConsts.MultiTenancyEnabled to false in the *.Core.Shared project (name of the PhoneBookDemoConsts will be like YourProjectNameConsts for your project).

Run API Host

Once you've done the configuration, you can run the application. Server side application only contains APIs. When you start the application you will see a login page like below:

If you log in to host application, then you will see a page like below:

You can navigate to Swagger UI, Hangfire Dashboard or GraphQL Playground from this page. Note that, by default only Swagger UI is enabled, you can enable Hangfire by following Hangfire documentation and GraphQL by following GraphQL documentation.

For example when you navigate Swagger UI, you will see following page:

Angular Application

Restore Packages

Navigate to the root folder of *.Web.Host project, open a command line and run the following command to restore the packages:

yarn

Then, run the following command to create dynamic bundles (This is only required for the first time when you download the project or when you update dynamic bundles):

npm run create-dynamic-bundles

We use yarn because NPM has some problems; It is slow and can not consistently resolve dependencies. Yarn solves those problems and it is compatible to NPM as well.

Running The Application

Open the command line and run the following command:

npm start

Once the application compiled, you can browse http://localhost:4200 in your browser. ASP.NET Zero also has also HMR (Hot Module Replacement) enabled. You can use the following command (instead of NPM start) to enable HMR on development time:

npm run hmr

In development time, since we use angular-cli and it is a separate process, we need to run *.Web.Host project and Angular UI separately. However, merged Angular solution can be published to a single website or two separate websites.

Login

All ready! Just run your solution to enter to the login page:

If multi-tenancy is enabled, you will see the current tenant and a change link. If so, click to Change and enter default as tenant name. If you leave it empty, you login as the host admin user. Then enter admin as user name and 123qwe as password (remember to change it to a more secure password on production!).

Application UI

After login to the application, you will see the sample dashboard screen:

ASP.NET Zero Power Tools

ASP.NET Zero Power Tools lets you to create a new page from the database to the UI layer by just typing your entity properties. It creates the entity, related permissions, application services, DTOs, client-side code, a menu element and so on... It also creates & applies database migrations.

Finally you will have a CRUD page with insert, update, delete, list and excel export functions. To minimize the effort of creating a new page, install the Power Tools from the following link:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Volosoft.AspNetZeroPowerTools

Solution Overview