Note that some of the information presented here regarding .NET 5 is no longer valid, due to fundamental changes made on the way to .NET 5 becoming ASP.NET Core 1.0. You can read more about those changes in the article, “Revisiting ASP.NET Core 1.0.”

For those tech gurus who just love to work with the latest Microsoft programming technologies, here’s a simple tutorial on how you can publish an ASP.NET 5 (vNext) application to DiscountASP.NET.

Please note that ASP.NET 5 (vNext) is still in Beta, so the instructions given today may or may not be valid in the future. The Release Candidate will not be available until November with the final release being slated for some time in the first quarter of 2016. More information can be found at Microsoft’s Roadmap. You’ll also want to go to the Official Website to read up on the new features as the file structure is very different from traditional web forms and MVC programming.

Another key feature is that vNext has been designed for maximum portability, allowing you to deploy your code to a Mac or Linux operating system. This guide is meant for developers who want to try it out now and only covers the publishing aspect, using the sample ASP.NET 5 Preview Template as an example.

Publishing the application locally and then uploading it using FTP:

In order to create a vNext application, you’ll need to obtain a copy of Visual Studio 2015 Professional or higher. Install it and then launch the program.

1) Select File -> New -> Project…

2) Under Visual C#, select Web and to the right, select ASP.NET Web Application. I’ll give this project a name vNextDemo.

3) Now in the New ASP.NET Project window, select Web Application for the ASP.NET 5 Preview Template. You can also uncheck Host in the cloud under Microsoft Azure. Click the OK button to continue.

4) Notice the new file structure in the Solution Explorer window. All the configuration files are now stored as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. I won’t go into details regarding any programming aspects as this is not the purpose of this guide but wanted to point out a few things that you should be aware of. References are now added to your project using NuGet, and an ASP.NET vNext application publishes two folders, an approot folder containing all your assemblies, runtime libraries, and source code and a wwwroot folder which contains the static content of your website (e.g. html, images, css, etc.). This is important to know as it must be maintained in order for your application to work properly.

5) Since the sample application is already complete, let’s start the publishing process. Select Build -> Publish from the menu bar.

6) Click on File System.

7) Give the profile a name.

8) Find a path on your local machine to target the publishing. I created a vNextDemo folder under the Downloads folder. Click the Next> button.

9) On the Settings page, choose Release for Configuration. For the Target DNX Version, you should be able to choose any, but it should match the framework your application is written in. For more information about DNX and what it is, the official documentation can be found here.  If you plan to use the 64-bit versions, you will need to open up a support ticket to request that support for 32-bit applications to be disabled in order for it to work properly.  You can uncheck Publish using Powershell script. Click on Next>.

10) Click the Publish button to start.

11) After your project has been published, you should see the two folders approot and wwwroot.

12) Open up the web.config file in the wwwroot folder and add the following XML markup in the <configuration> section to enable Full trust:

<system.web>
    <trust level="Full" />
</system.web>

Upload these two folders to your hosting account. You can ignore the other files. Now, mark the wwwroot folder as a Web Application using the tool in the DiscountASP.NET Control Panel.

13) That’s it. Your application now works but only from a sub-directory (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/wwwroot).

Publishing the application to the root of the site:

If you want it to work in the root, you just need to make a few modifications after publishing. First, modify the project.json file in /approot/src/projectname directory by changing the first line from “webroot”: “../../../wwwroot” to “webroot”: “../../../htdocs”.  Upload the contents of the wwwroot folder directly to the root of the hosting account along with the approot folder. Open a support ticket and request that we move the approot folder one level up (i.e. on the same level as the htdocs folder). And voila, your application is now working from the root.

Publishing Directly Using FTP within Visual Studio:

You can also publish directly using FTP within Visual Studio by creating and using a publishing profile. Open up Notepad, copy and paste the following markup (contents) into Notepad:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<publishData>
  <publishProfile profileName="FTP" publishMethod="FTP" publishUrl="ftp://ftpaddress" userName="username" userPWD="password" destinationAppUrl="http://wwwaddress" />
</publishData>

replacing ftpaddress, username, password, and wwwaddress with the appropriate values. Save the file and name it ftp.publishhsettings without the .txt extension. Now at Step 6 above, instead of choosing File System, select Import instead and use the ftp.publishsettings file. The rest of the instructions that follow should apply when configuring the application.

Please note that Web Deploy publishing is not supported at this time and to run an ASP.NET 5 (vNext) application requires it to be deployed to an IIS 7.5 or higher server.

Lately I’ve been evaluating some companies that offer email communication solutions and was introduced to SendGrid by a coworker.  I found it offers a lot of great features to help someone reduce the time to create marketing emails, customer communication emails, newsletters, etc.

SendGrid offers a free account that you can use to send 12,000 emails every month. You’ll need a SendGrid account for this tutorial, so if you don’t already have one, take a minute to set up an account now.

In many cases you can start using SendGrid very quickly simply by changing the SMTP connection string in your application to use SendGrid’s SMTP server. But in this post I will show you how easy it is to create emails from start to finish, highlighting a couple of the features SendGrid offers.

A Simple Contact Form

Here are instructions on how you can create a simple contact form and send the results to yourself using SendGrid’s API.

1) Startup Visual Studio (in this demo, I am using Visual Studio 2013 and C# for my example).

2) Select File -> New -> Project…

3) Select the Web template and give your project a name.  In my example, I named it SendGridExample.  Hit the OK button to continue.

4) Select Empty template and hit OK.

5) Add the SendGrid C# Library (or whatever programming language you prefer to use) using NuGet.  Under Tools, select Library Package Manager -> Manage NuGet Packages for Solution…

6) Select the Online menu item on your left and in the upper right search text box, type in “sendgrid”.  Hit the Install button to install the library(ies) you need.

7) Now let’s add a Web Form for the project.  Under Solution Explorer, right click on the project name and select Add -> Web Form.

8) We’ll give the form a name like ContactUs.

9) Now go to Design View and using the Toolbox on your left, create a form using tables, text boxes, and text and add a submit button (e.g. Contact Us) as shown below.

10) Double click on the Contact Us button to bring up the code behind (ContactUs.aspx.cs) file and in the submit button Click Event, paste and modify the code below to your liking.  In this example, I am using SendGrid’s proprietary mail class, so you’ll need to add a using SendGrid statement to your list of includes at the top.  If you prefer and want to simplify your code a bit, you can just use .NET’s built-in libraries (i.e. System.Net and System.Net.Mail) to compose the email instead, and we provide sample code here.

Both cases require the .NET mail libraries.

var message = new SendGridMessage();
List<String> recipients = new List<String>
{
  @"Contact <[email protected]>",
  @"Marketing <[email protected]>",
  @"Test <[email protected]>"
};
message.AddTo(recipients);
message.From = new MailAddress("[email protected]", "Contact Us Form");
message.Subject = subjectTextBox.Text;
message.Html += "<strong>Name</strong>: " + nameTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>Address</strong>: " + addressTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>City</strong>: " + cityTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>State/Province</strong>: " + stateTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>Country</strong>: " + countryTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>Zip Code</strong>: " + zipCodeTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>Telephone</strong>: " + telephoneTextBox.Text + "<br />";
message.Html += "<strong>Email Address</strong>: " + emailAddressTextBox.Text + "<br /><br />";
message.Html += messageTextBox.Text;

var credentials = new NetworkCredential("apikey", "API_Key");

var transportWeb = new Web(credentials);

transportWeb.DeliverAsync(message);

Response.Redirect("ContactSuccess.html");

SendGrid recommends that you create and use an API key to authenticate and send email, but you can also use your SendGrid username and password. If you use the API key, use “apikey” for the SMTP username.

11) That’s it. Press F5 to build and test your code.

A Marketing Email or Newsletter

SendGrid offers a wide variety of features that allow you create, manage, and perform analysis on marketing emails or newsletters such as Click Tracking, Google Analytics, Open Tracking, and Subscription Tracking just to name a few.  I’ll demonstrate some of these features in the program below.

1)    In the same project, add a new web form and name it SendNewsLetter.  Open the code behind file and in the Page_Load Event Handler, paste and/or modify the following code to your liking.

var message = new SendGridMessage();
List<String> recipients = new List<String>
{
  @"Contact <[email protected]>",
  @"Marketing <[email protected]>",
  @"Test <[email protected]>"
};
message.AddTo(recipients);
message.From = new MailAddress("[email protected]", "Postmaster");
message.Subject = "November ACME Newsletter";
message.Html += "Here is your ACME Newsletter for the month of November.  We have a number of exciting deals this month<br /><br />";
message.Html += "ACME Toy Cars are now just $29.99 and will make a great gift for kids for the holidays.<br /><br />";
message.Html += "ACME Christmas Trees ornaments, only $59.99 for a box of 20.  Click <a href=\"http://www.troubleshootingcenter.com\">here</a> for more details.<br /><br />";

var username = "sendgridusername";
var password = "sendgridpassword";
var credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);

var transportWeb = new Web(credentials);

transportWeb.DeliverAsync(message);

Response.Redirect("ContactSuccess.html");

2)    Now go to your SendGrid Account, expand the Settings node on the menu to your left, and click on Tracking.  Enable Click Tracking, Open Tracking, and Subscription Tracking.  If you notice in the code above, I’ve added an HTML link to a webpage.  Click Tracking will track if the user clicks on that link which is embedded into your newsletter.  Open Tracking will track if a user opens an email, and Subscription Tracking will automatically add a unsubscribe link to your email so that it complies with the CAN-SPAM Act.  The beauty of these features is that no extra coding is needed to implement them.  SendGrid automatically does that for you with the flip of a switch.  Hit F5 to build and test the code.  Once you receive the email, try clicking on the HTML and Unsubscribe links and proceed to the next steps.

3)    To check if someone has clicked on a link in your newsletter or unsubscribed, just go to the Dashboard or click on the Stats menu item.

4)    To check the status of an email such as Delivered, Opened, etc. click on the Activity menu item.

5)    That’s it for these features.  You can use these tools (and combine them with others offered) to help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and customer engagement and make adjustments if need be to improve your program.  If you’re not a developer and find coding hard to understand, then you’re in luck.  SendGrid provides a Marketing Email wizard and WSIWYG interface with templates to help you draft very professional looking marketing emails.

Other features you will want to explore include white labeling, alerts, spam checking, and webhooks.  Using SendGrid, you can fine tune your marketing campaigns to get a better ROI.