Experimental playground for Scripting ASP.NET Core apps

What is this?

Quickly hacked together at MVP Summit. The idea is, you can write an ASP.NET Core app as a script, with lowest possible ceremony, and then run them using .NET CLI.

It's based on Roslyn scripting and dotnet-script project.

Getting up and running

1. Create a project.json with your dependencies. You can reference anything that works on .NET Core. Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel and Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc are implicitly available to you. You also need to reference the Dotnet.Script.AspNet as a tool - as we will be using it for running the app.

Sample project.json

{
  "frameworks": {
    "netcoreapp1.0": {
      "dependencies": {
        "GenFu": "1.2.1"
      }
    }
  },
  "tools": {
    "Dotnet.Script.AspNet": {
      "version": "0.0.1-beta",
      "imports": [
        "portable-net45+win8",
        "dnxcore50"
      ]
    }
  }
}

In the above case, GenFu is a package we wanna use in our ASP.NET Core app and Dotnet.Script.AspNet is mandatory (it's a runner). Again, no need to reference Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel and Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc - but you will need to pull in any other package you want.

2. dotnet restore

3. Create a script file (CSX) where you can interact with ASP.NET core pipeline, set up services, configure MVC, add controllers, models, use NuGet packages etc. The hooks from the Startup class are surfaced as Confgure and Services global methods. Sample is shown below.

using GenFu;

[Route("api/[controller]")]
public class PersonController : Controller
{
    [HttpGet]
    public Person Get()
    {
        var person = A.New<Person>();
        return person;
    }
}

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

Services(s => s.AddMvc());
Configure((app, env) => app.UseMvc());

3. Run dotnet script-aspnet {script_name}.csx. This will launch Kestrel and start your app.

4. Profit.