ASP.NET Core - Write Apps with Visual Studio Code and Entity Framework By August 2016 Open source and cross-platform development are crucial for Microsoft’s current and future strategies. Many building blocks of the.NET stack have been open sourced, while others have been developed to embrace and support the new strategy. ASP.NET Core 1.0, currently in Release Candidate (RC) mode, is the most recent open source technology for building cross-platform applications for the Web and cloud, running on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Now that there is Visual Studio for Mac, is it possible to do everything you do on Windows also on Mac? I've read that I should be using ASP.NET Core instead of the full ASP.NET framework if I want. This tutorial shows how to develop a simple web application using Visual Studio for Mac. We’ll go through how to create and debug an ASP.NET Core web application using C#.

ASP.NET Core lets you write Model-View-Controller (MVC) applications with C# and relies on.NET Core (), the new open source and cross-platform modular set of runtimes, libraries and compilers—in RC, too. The biggest benefit of ASP.NET Core is that it’s completely independent from any proprietary project system or integrated development environment, which means you can also build an ASP.NET Core application outside of Microsoft Visual Studio, and on OSes different than Windows. To accomplish this, you use a number of command-line tools to scaffold, build and run applications, while you can use Visual Studio Code for editing. There’s a lot of work in progress yet, so some features might change until it reaches the Release-to-Manufacturing (RTM) milestone.

For instance, ASP.NET Core used to rely on the.NET Execution Environment (DNX) and its command-line interface (CLI) to build and manage applications; because ASP.NET Core is built upon.NET Core, DNX will be retired and its CLI will switch to the.NET Core command-line tools for future releases, so keep this in mind if you want to start writing cross-platform Web apps with ASP.NET Core and C#. This article explains how to create a cross-platform ASP.NET Core Web application that leverages Entity Framework 7 to execute data operations against a database, and how to write code in Visual Studio Code (), which you use on Linux, OS X and Windows. Because the focus is on data, I recommend you read the “.NET Core and Visual Studio Code” document on the official Web site (). You’ll write several commands based on the DNX environment for consistency with the current RC; keep in mind this will be replaced with commands from the.NET Core CLI once ASP.NET Core turns into RTM. I’ll point out commands that’ll be replaced where appropriate. I’ll create my sample application using the new Visual Studio Code tool. Visual Studio Code is a sophisticated, multi-language and cross-platform development tool that puts writing code at its center and that has hooks so you can issue build commands.

I’m assuming you already have installed Visual Studio Code, Node.js (), SQL Server Express Edition () and ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC (). Creating a Sample Database First, create a database with which to work.

You might use an existing database, or you could also define the data model with the Entity Framework Code First approach, but support for code migrations in ASP.NET Core is still in progress and not stable at this time. So you’ll simply create a new database that stores a list of car models and their manufacturers’ names.

In SQL Server Management Studio, create a new database called Cars, then write and execute the query shown in Figure 1, which defines a table called Cars, with three columns: Id (primary key and auto-increment), CarModel (of type NVarChar(Max)) and Manufacturer (of type NVarChar(Max)). > npm install -g yo generator-aspnet gulp bower That will install Yeoman (represented by “yo”) in the global location (-g) together with gulp (a tool for task automation) and bower (a client-side library manager). Notice that Yeoman ships with a number of generators, including the ASP.NET generator and the Visual Studio Code extension generator. The generator-aspnet option in the previous command line will download and install the ASP.NET Core generator that will simplify your work. When ready, using the cd (or chdir) command, move into a folder where you want to create a new application (cd C: temp). At this point, type the following command line.

> yo aspnet This will open the Yeoman ASP.NET generator, as you can see in Figure 2. Figure 2 Starting the Yeoman Generator Select the Web Application template and press Enter. In the next screen, enter CarModels as the application name and press Enter. The generator defines the application’s root namespace based on the app name casing.

As a consequence, if CarModels is the application name, then the root namespace will also be CarModels; but if you enter carmodels or carModels as the app’s name, then your root namespace will be carmodels or carModels, respectively. Take care of this when specifying the application name. After a few seconds, Yeoman completes generating a new ASP.NET Core application into a subfolder called CarModels.