Lesson 1.2: Multiple, Default, and Hidden Commands

Having one command, like we did in our first lesson, is useful but limited. With Spectre.Console.Cli, we can define multiple commands, each with their own arguments and options, and each getting called when the user specifies that command in the command-line arguments. So let's take a look at defining multiple commands and a default command … Continue reading Lesson 1.2: Multiple, Default, and Hidden Commands →

Lesson 5.8: Microservices Concepts With MonsterTemplateService

With our first service complete, it's time for us to look into creating more services. Each of our data files in the SimpleRPG game can really be thought of as its own service. Each one represents some classes and domain model like items or monsters. And while they may interact with one another (monsters can … Continue reading Lesson 5.8: Microservices Concepts With MonsterTemplateService →

Azure Static Web Apps with Blazor WebAssembly

Azure has Static Web Apps functionality integrated with Blazor now, but only works with GitHub as the source repository for the preview version. This article has a great description of how to get it working. It appears that the Azure Static Web Apps functionality really streamlines the process for building CI/CD for these types of … Continue reading Azure Static Web Apps with Blazor WebAssembly →

Lesson 1.1: Starting with Spectre.Console.Cli

I've been writing a lot of command-line apps to try out .NET Core and now .NET 5. There's always a lot of repeated code to setup the application, parse the command-line arguments, and then map those to operations performed by the program. I started researching some frameworks for building command-line interfaces (CLI) and there are … Continue reading Lesson 1.1: Starting with Spectre.Console.Cli →

Lesson 5.7 Design REST Service for Data Retrieval

REST web services (Representational State Transfer) is a style of architecture based on a set of principles that describe how networked resources are defined and addressed. It is important to note that REST is a style of software architecture as opposed to a set of standards. As a result, applications or architectures are sometimes referred … Continue reading Lesson 5.7 Design REST Service for Data Retrieval →

Lesson 5.6: Build Repository Pattern for Data Access

With our simple Azure Functions web service in place, we can now focus on providing more complex functionality from our service. We will focus on read-only service features for now, since we're reading game data and no persisting any data yet. We want to build a service that will return lists of elements based on … Continue reading Lesson 5.6: Build Repository Pattern for Data Access →

.NET 5 Releases

As you've probably already heard, .NET version 5 has released. Version 5 is actually an upgrade of .NET Core 3.1, so project and libraries that targeted .NET Core 3.1 will upgrade fairly cleanly to .NET 5. There are many improvements in .NET 5.0: .NET 5.0 is already battle-tested by being hosted for months at dot.net and Bing.com.Performance is greatly improved across … Continue reading .NET 5 Releases →

Lesson 5.5: Create Web Service to Retrieve ItemTemplates

With a working Azure Functions project in place, we are ready to start moving code into our web service. We have various sources of game data: items, monsters, locations, quests, recipes, and traders. Each of these data sources would make a great web service. So let's start by creating a simple web service that loads … Continue reading Lesson 5.5: Create Web Service to Retrieve ItemTemplates →

Lesson 5.4: Create New Azure Functions Project

As we discussed in the introduction to this chapter, we will be learning how to use Azure Functions to build the web services for our game. Azure has several compute and hosting options to pick from, but since we're investigating the serverless options, Azure Functions makes the most sense. But let's take a quick look … Continue reading Lesson 5.4: Create New Azure Functions Project →

Lesson 5.3: Create Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Blazor app

Now that we have our game building automatically in Azure Pipelines and an Azure Storage account configured to host our application, we need to build an automated pipeline to deploy new builds to the desired storage account. We will do this by using the Releases pipeline in Azure DevOps. Similar to Continuous Integration (which we … Continue reading Lesson 5.3: Create Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Blazor app →