Pathos

Pathos is a Greek word which means suffering, experience or emotion. It is also one of the 3 modes of persuasion in which one appeals to their audiences emotions. If you have ever tried to take something you've learned in a coding tutorial and apply it in a real world scenario you know the suffering and experience I'm talking about. I got tired of tutorials leaving me in a place where I felt unequipped to solve problems or create a production ready app. Hercules had 12 labors that made him the perfect embodiment of pathos. Creating a tutorial that would leave readers feeling empowered was my labors.

Before reading these guides make sure you have read the Getting Started section below.

1. Config files and Secrets Manager
2. Handling Entity Framework Migrations in deployment
3. Unit Testing Controllers
4. Deploying service to Azure

The Project

Every tutorial for .NET MVC apps is always for blogs, or a classroom or something that conceptually everyone can grasp but is kind of boring. This tutorial will walk you through building the management app for a project I've wanted to implement for a really long time, GitHub Merit Badges. If you want to know more about the project here is a breif description I wrote up for a Hack-a-thon. Unfortunately the code for detecting, and assigning merit badges has not been started yet. That being said I still need a way to manage the users, badges, and scoreboard as well as provide a way for people to view a users badges.

Getting Started

.NET Core SDK and Runtime

Below is the output from running dotnet --info on my system at the time of publishing this project. To avoid inconsistencies in the write up I suggest installing the.NET Core SDK version (2.2.4) and runtime version (2.2.6) shown below. If multiple SDKs are installed the dotnet core cli always uses the latest regardless of what has been targeted by the app in the *.csproj file.

.NET Core SDK (reflecting any global.json):
 Version:   2.2.401
 Commit:    729b316c13

Runtime Environment:
 OS Name:     Mac OS X
 OS Version:  10.13
 OS Platform: Darwin
 RID:         osx.10.13-x64
 Base Path:   /usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk/2.2.401/

Host (useful for support):
  Version: 2.2.6
  Commit:  7dac9b1b51

.NET Core SDKs installed:
  2.1.3 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk]
  2.1.4 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk]
  2.2.401 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk]

.NET Core runtimes installed:
  Microsoft.AspNetCore.All 2.2.6 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.AspNetCore.All]
  Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 2.2.6 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.AspNetCore.App]
  Microsoft.NETCore.App 2.0.4 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App]
  Microsoft.NETCore.App 2.0.5 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App]
  Microsoft.NETCore.App 2.2.6 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App]

To install additional .NET Core runtimes or SDKs:
  https://aka.ms/dotnet-download

Generate a new WebApi Project

dotnet new webapi --name <name> # I used Pathos

Exclude dotnet core artifacts from version control

Add the following .gitignore file to the project. Additionally add the following to the .gitignore file to exclude local entity framework artifacts.

# Ignore Local Database for Entity Core
*.db