Ravindra Devrani

Azure blob storage is a storage solution provided by microsoft. You can store data like images, audio, video, json files, zip files etc etc in the azure.

What are we going to learn?

• How to create a web application that stores and manipulate the images in the cloud.
• We will perform all the CRUD (create, read, update and delete) operations.

Tech used

• .NET Core 9 (MVC app)
• SQL server 2022
• Azure storage account

High level overview

• We will save image url in the database and images in the storage account(blob container)

Let’s create an storage account first

Step 1:

Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL is a fully managed and serverless NoSQL and vector database for modern app development, including AI applications and agents. With its SLA-backed speed and availability as well as instant dynamic scalability, it is ideal for real-time NoSQL applications that require high performance and distributed computing over massive volumes of NoSQL and vector data.

Soruce: learn.microsoft.com, you can learn more about it from here

Asynchronous task is a non-blocking task. Main thread goes back to the thread pool (and free to do other tasks) when it reaches to await – and new thread is assigned when wait is complete.

It is different from the multi-threading. In multi-threding, task is divided between multiple threads. Cores of your CPU are utilized.

Analogy

Let’s say you have some chores like:

1. Boiling eggs 🫕 (or sweet potatoes🍠🍠 if you dont eat eggs 🥚🥚)
2. Clean 🧹🪣 the house

There are multiple ways to achieve this:

• Direct or traditional approach: Object creates its own dependencies.

• Inverted approach (inversion of control): Dependencies are created outside the object. This responsibility is given to someone else.

Example 1 (Direct approach):

We have a service named EmailService which is an implementation of INotificationService.

public interface INotificationService
{
    void SendNotification();
}

public class EmailService : INotificationService
{
    public void SendNotification()
    {
        // code to send notification 
    }
}

OrderService need to use the INotificationService.

Please visit this post first, where I have made this project from scratch and wrote CRUD APIs.

Source code

• Backend and specific only to this tutorial: https://github.com/rd003/ng-node-fullstack/pull/new/jwt-refresh
• Complete project with angular : https://github.com/rd003/ng-node-fullstack

JSON web token (JWT) and why it is needed

REST Apis are session less. You can not maintain the authentication session for the whole application. For that purpose, JSON web token (JWT) comes in play. How it works

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) REST API using Node.js, Express.js, Sequelize, and SQL Server. I have tried to make it a less verbose. It is more like a technical documentation to create the rest apis in this tech stack. However, I have tried to explain all the essential things. This is ideal if you’re looking to integrate a SQL Server database with a Node.js backend using Sequelize as the ORM. We are using sql server in this tutorial but you can easily replace it with other sql databases.

• In dotnet, a Middleware is a piece of code that runs in the request pipeline.
• Middlewares are put together in a sequence, and their order matters.
• When a request is made, it goes through each of the middleware.
• Response flow back in reverse order through the middleware.
• Each middleware has capability to modify the request or short circuits the pipeline.
• Each middleware can change the response before it’s sent to the client.

Create a new web api project

Run these commands in a sequence to create a new project.

dotnet new sln -o JwtDotnet9

cd JwtDotnet9

dotnet sln add JwtDotnet9/JwtDotnet9.csproj

Open the project in vs code.

code .

=> Source Code

=> Securing The .NET 9 App: Signup, Login, JWT, Refresh Tokens, and Role Based Access with PostgreSQL

Install the required nuget packages

dotnet add package Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.JwtBearer

Jwt configuration in appsettings

Open appsettings.json and add these lines

• byte is a value type in c#
• byte is an unsigned integer which stores value from 0 to 255, which means it can not store negetive numbers.
• Size of byte is 8-bit (1 byte)
• CTS equivalent of byte is System.Byte
• It’s default value is 0
• It is great for memory optimization when dealing with small numbers.

Examples:

byte a = 10;

Console.WriteLine(a);

Use cases

1. Working with ASCII value

 byte asciiValue = (byte)'R'; // 82
 byte asciiValue2 = (byte)'r'; // 114

2. Encoding text into bytes

 using System.Text;

 string message = "Ravindra";
 byte[] encoded = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message);

 Console.WriteLine($"{string.Join(",",encoded)}");

 // op: 82,97,118,105,110,100,114,97

Note: Each character is encoded using UTF-8. For standard letters, the byte values match their ASCII codes.. (R: 82, a:97, v:118 …)

There has been a discussion around town about the difference between an IEnumerable and an IQueryable, especially in c# interviews. I won’t be diving into the fact that IEnumerable is part of the System.Collections namespace and IQueryable belongs to System.Linq namespace (or did I???). Rather, I’ll focus on the practical usage of both—how they work, and when to use each.

IQueryable

 public IActionResult GetPeople()
 {
  // It will retrieve 2 records from database 
  IQueryable<Person> people = _context.People.Take(2); 
  //  Note: At the above line, no data will be retrieved from the database

  return Ok(people); // Data will be retrieved here
 }

Corresponding sql

Note that, I am using Sqlite, the above code is translated to this query: