Using the WebAPI to send errors for your apps 26. January 2013 Shawn (0) If your app does anything at all complex, it’s going to crash. You’re going to miss checking something for null. You’re going to use a resource that doesn’t exist. Your app is going to crash. Luckily there are some ways to make sure you know what’s happening. Little Watson by Andy Pennell shows us a great way to send application errors but requires the user to email them to you. Bjorn Kuiper extended Little Watson by removing the need to email the report and instead send it to a PHP endpoint. This is a great solution provided your server is setup to run PHP . If you don’twant to use PHP, don’t want to install PHP or if you are using a hosting service that does not run PHP then you’re out of luck. Instead of convincing your web provider to install PHP you could create a WCF service, but that seems like a lot of overhead. You could also create an ASP.NET web page and put the error details into a query parameter, but that seems hokie. Luckily the Web API has been introduced. The Web API... [More]
Creating a minimal Web API web project 10. May 2012 Shawn MVC, Web API (3) The ASP.NET web projects have a history of being bloated. Phil Haack created a Really Empty ASP.NET MVC 3 Project Template. The same is true for MVC4 and the new Web API. The “Empty” MVC 4 Application (using razor) has 37 references, 16 JavaScript files, 15 CSS files, 13 images, 3 razor files, and a partridge in a pear tree. This is far from empty. But it does give you everything you could need to build out your own MVC application. The Web API MVC 4 Application has all of that plus two controllers (one API and one view), and one more razor file. I wanted to create a simple project that would allow me to take advantage of the awesomeness that Web API brings but without all the overhead of MVC or anything else. I asked Glenn Block if he knew about anything out there that talked about the smallest possible Web API project. This started a couple of educational conversions in which Glenn brought in other great Web API minds. He quickly stated that I could use self host. For one, I wa... [More]