Cookie vs Token Based Authentication with Angular2 using ASP.NET 5

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I recently produces a series of tutorials on how to piggy back on aspnet5’s cookie based authentication in an angular2 application. If you’d like to learn more about how aspnet5 and angular2 can be used together, make sure to check out the full series here.

Part 1: Up and running with ASP.NET 5 Identity

Part 2: Cookie Based Auth with ASP.NET 5 and Angular 2

Part 3: Discussion

Hope you enjoy the videos and make sure to subscribe if you do, cheers!

Get Started with VS2015, AspNet 5 RC1, Angular 2 alpha 47

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In this screencast we setup a dev environment for VS2015 Update 1, TypeScript 1.7.4 and Angular 2 alpha 47 starting from an empty aspnet5 project template. The plan is to evolve this example to include cookie based authentication with aspnet identity and fetch data securely from a webapi controller. Code available at github.

Let me know what you think, hope you like the video and make sure to subscribe if you do, cheers!

Introduction to ASP.NET 5 (Part I) – Frameworks, DNVM, DNX and DNU

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This is the first part of an introduction to ASP.NET 5 series. We start easy by taking a look at the different runtime versions and the dnvm, dnx and dnu commands. Plan to release a new part/lesson every week, check out the entire playlist here.

Cheers!

Build automation for Angular 2 and TypeScript with Gulp

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In this screencast we focus on creating a smooth workflow, we’ll build, run code analysis and serve the code, all with gulp. We also learn how to keep the browser in sync with the code. Let me know what you guys think.


Source code @ https://github.com/ajtowf/ng2_play/

Setup npm and gulp

Start off by installing gulp globally and then run npm init to create a packages.json file. Then install the gulp modules we’ll use locally.

npm install -g gulp
npm init // answer the questions, default values are OK
npm install gulp gulp-typescript gulp-sourcemaps gulp-tslint --save-dev
npm install browser-sync superstatic --save-dev // for serving the app

Create the following files in the root directory: gulpfile.js, gulp.config.js and tslint.json

Serve the application

Now that we have everything setup, we’ll get our code analyzed, compiled, served and updated as we save changes to our files just by typing:

gulp

Pretty neat, right? I hope you guys enjoyed the screencast, until next time, have an excellent day!

Aurelia Validation

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In this screencast we implement validation in our simple todo application that we created here, it’s basically the same exercise as we did in the angular 2 forms screencast, make sure to check it out if you missed it. The idea is to compare aurelia with angular2, imho aurelia is winning the race right now, let me know what you think.

Steps to get validation with Aurelia

If you’re new to aurelia, make sure you check out my first screencast on aurelia here, before you follow these steps on how to implement validation.

Install the validation plugin by executing the following command via JSPM:

jspm install aurelia-validation

 
And change the aurelia-app attribute to aurelia-app=”main”.

<body aurelia-app="main">

 
The aurelia framework will now bootstrap the application by looking for your main.js file and executing the exported configure method. Add a new main.js file with the following contents:

export function configure(aurelia) {
  aurelia.use
    .standardConfiguration()
    .developmentLogging()
    .plugin('aurelia-validation'); 

  aurelia.start().then(a => a.setRoot('app', document.body)); 
}

 
Once you’ve loaded the plugin, validation is set up using the fluent validation API in the view model (borrowed from http://aurelia.io/validation/#/).

import {Validation} from 'aurelia-validation';
export class Person {
  static inject() { return [Validation];}
  constructor(validation) {
    this.firstName = 'John';
    this.validation = validation.on(this)
      .ensure('firstName')
        .isNotEmpty()
        .hasLengthBetween(3,10);
  }
}

 
With the following template:

<template>
  <form role="form" validate.bind="validation">
    <div class="form-group">
      <label>First Name</label>
      <input type="text" value.bind="firstName" class="form-control" >
    </div>
  </form>
</template>

 

That’s it, you’re done! You don’t need to mess around with annotations and keep track of what needs to be passed as viewBindings or directives to the template as seen in angular 2 forms. Honestly, it just works!

Conclusion

For the moment Aurelia feels a lot more finished and easier to use. I was struggling with getting angular2 forms up and running and it’s poorly documented, whereas I could just follow the documentation on the aurelia validation github repo and be up and running within minutes. Let me know what you think in the comments, it’s OK to disagree! ;-)

Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed the screencast, until next time, have an excellent day!
 

Source code as always at @ https://github.com/ajtowf/ng2_overview/

Pluralsight Author

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My last couple of screencasts, including the last blog entry was about angularjs 2.0 and aurelia. That’s because I decided to audition for producing courses for pluralsight, and guess what — I’m now an approved pluralsight author. If you don’t know what pluralsight is, here’s a definition by google (authored by themselves?):

Pluralsight is the leading online provider of tech and creative training for professionals.

The audition

To become an author for pluralsight, you need to do an audition. There’s a hard time limit on 10 minutes and you should cover a topic completely in this time, having an introduction, main part and a summary. You can obviously do some assumptions about the viewers’ prior knowledge since 10 minutes really isn’t that much of time. I did a module on bootstrapping the application with angularjs 2.0, as if it was a part of a larger course. You can see it here below, let me know what you guys think!

Time spent

I spent a day familiarizing myself with the framework and producing an example, you’d save some time if you pick a topic you already know of course. Then another day editing and revising the video, bear in mind I hadn’t used the video editing software, camtasia, before. All and all, including emailing back and forth with my acquisition editor I spent roughly two work days, 8 hours each. Was it worth it? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, so far it hasn’t been too much work in my opinion.

I really look forward to producing a course in the next couple of months. Until next time, have a nice day!

AngularJS 2.0 Forms & Validation

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In this screen cast I familiarized myself with angular 2 forms by extending the todo application that we created in our previous screencast, check out the screencast below and let me know what you think.

Common misstakes

I’ve seen many questions on stackoverflow where people even struggle to setup the most basic example. The angular team are lagging behind with sample code on angular.io and the typescript definition file on definitely typed is a mess.

At the time of writing the current alpha release is up to 34, the highlighted lines are essential to get right be able to use angular 2 forms.

import {Component, View, bootstrap} from 'angular2/angular2';
import {formDirectives, FormBuilder, ControlGroup, Control} from 'angular2/angular2';
import {Validators} from 'angular2/angular2';

@Component({
  selector: 'app',
  viewBindings: [FormBuilder]
})
@View({
  templateUrl: 'app.html', 
  directives: [formDirectives]
})
class AppComponent {
  constructor(fb: FormBuilder) {    
    // use the formbuilder here...
  }
}

 

  1. Don’t try to import from angular2/forms even if their documentation says so if you’re using the definition file from definitely typed, it’s all under angular2/angular2.
  2. Make sure you pass the FormBuilder to a property named viewBindings to the Component-annotation and nothing else, this keeps changing name so it’s easy to get wrong.
  3. If dependency injection to the constructor fails, you are probably doing the first point wrong.

Completing the angular.d.ts file

The angular team seems to be lazy on updating the definitely typed repo definition file. If you’re playing around with forms, you probably want to mark a field as required. To be able to do so by following some samples, you’ll need to add a static property to the Validators class in the definition file angular2.d.ts.

class Validators {
  static required: any;
}

 

Conclusion

I can’t shake the feeling that they are over complicating things, the syntax is very verbose and stuff is happening behind the scenes that always don’t seem that intuitive. The code is changing a lot from one version to another, it feels a bit premature to see all the ng-conf sessions talking about angular 2. It’s obvious that the community is frustrated (from reading blogs and stack overflow questions) over that it’s quite hard to get a simple sample up and running even though I personally don’t share that feeling.

Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed the screencast, until next time, have a nice day as always!

 

Source code as always at @ https://github.com/ajtowf/ng2_overview/tree/ng2

Aurelia VS AngularJS 2.0

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Angular

I spend a couple of hours familiarizing myself with angular 2 for a pluralsight audition which resulted in the following screencast.

Aurelia

I then got an interesting comment that aurelia is the client side app framework to use. I try to be agnostic about the frameworks, libs and the tools that I use, so spent a couple of hours familiarizing myself with aurelia as well which resulted in the following screencast where I port the angular app in a matter of minutes.

Conclussions

Angular is at the time I’m writing this post in alpha and it’s changing a lot, which is really frustrating since something always seems to be broken and documentation/examples are inaccurate even on their own site. It’s hard to keep track of if it’s *for, *ngfor, *ng-for or something completely different from one build to the other.

I like that web components are the mainstay and it unifies react.js, angular.js and polymer. One big thumbs up to that $scope is gone, but also a big thumbs down for that two-way data-bindings is gone. Kind of a deal breaker for me. Angular has teamed up with the typescript team and they are pushing it which definitely is a good thing but not angular specific ergo no credit for that.

Learning curve was about the same for both frameworks, both are using the ES6 module loading system and depending on runtime transpilation to ES5 for now. What tips the scale towards Aurelia for me is that it’s cleaner, supports two-way data-bindings and that it’s all about conventions over configuration/code. That’s my opinion after a first look at both frameworks, watch the screencasts and judge for yourself.

As I mentioned I try to stay agnostic about the frameworks, libs and tools that I use, but I’ll definitely give aurelia a try for my next web project and try to forget that there is an IDE named VS Code out there. *BOOM* ;-)

EDIT: About 2-way data binding

It’s ridiculous how many emails I’ve received about this, but really, there is no 2-way data binding in angular 2. Do not confuse the square-bracket-parenthesis-syntax [(ng-model)] with two-way bindings — it one-way binds to the property with square brackets and listens for events with parenthesis. They obviously realized that typing

is cumbersome so they introduced a new directive called ng-model

So now you have very angular specific code in your view templates instead of just two-way binding to the DOM property. I refactor the code to bind to the checked property from this screencast in the beginning of next one here.

I like angular

Don’t get me wrong, I like angular and I will use angular 2, but I don’t mindlessly love everything they do like some fan boy. Stay open minded people and don’t be afraid to express your opinion, it’s just yet another framework. You don’t need to love everything the angular team produces.

By the way, make sure to check out my latest screencast on angular 2 forms!

 

Until next time, have a nice day!  

 

Source code as always at @ https://github.com/ajtowf

Links: aurelia.io angular.io

Keywords : Visual Studio Code, HTML5, JavaScript, AngularJS 2.0, Aurelia, TypeScript

TVMS Feature Demo – Turn your mobile device into an IP-camera

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We’ve just added a new feature to TVMS (Towfeek Video Management System) where we enable you to turn your mobile device into an IP-camera. All video sessions can be stored and retrieved for playback with our TVMS API. We support streaming from Android and iOS devices but the feed can be consumed by almost any client.

 

 

Check out the demo and let us know what you think!

 

Keywords : TVMS, RTSP, IP-Camera, Security, CCTV

SignalR Scaleout with SQL Server in Azure

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A project for one of our customers recently had this scenario where mobile clients posted updates to a REST-backend running on one site and we needed to notify all clients browsing a different site. The first technique that came into mind was SignalR but we had only used it within the same app before. Now we’d like to share a hub across apps.

Fortunately, the solution was very simple, SignalR supports CORS and scaling out with SQL server out of the box. All you need to install is the following two nuget packages.

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR
PM> Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.SqlServer

This is truly powerful and the SignalR-team has done a great job making it easy to use. There’s an excellent official guide here. Here’s a screencast to show how quickly and easy you can get it up and running in Azure from scratch.

 

Source code @ https://github.com/ajtowf/signalrlab/

 

Hope you find it useful!

 

Keywords : VS2013, Azure, SignalR, WebApi, MVC, OWIN, SQL Server