Ubuntu: deploy .NET Core app

Today, I want to walk-through the steps I used to deploy ASP.NET Core website application to Ubuntu Server. ASP.NET Core supports several Linux distributions, I am using Ubuntu Server.

From a quick internet search I found 3 decent blog posts:

1. decatechlabs.com article
2. garywoodfine.com article
3. blog.bobbyallen.me post

There already are many articles which talk about how to set up your development environment for .NET Core but this post starts, where they end. It’s about getting production ready.

These are to-the-point & well written. But, either these posts are more than a year old, or they are for setting up your development environment, not for production deployment. You need to install .NET Core run-time, not the .NET Core SDK (which also includes run-time). You can download it from: 

C# Split CSV string

	string str = "Tom Cruise, Scott, ,Bob | at";
	IEnumerable<string> names = str
	.Split(new char[]{',', '|'})
	.Where(x=>x!=null && x.Trim().Length > 0)
	.Select(x=>x.Trim());

view raw SplitCsvString_Advanced hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Output

Tom
Cruise
Scott
Bob
at

Stackoverflow post:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/45799171/799593

Read/Write Large XML Files

Up to certain extent the performance quite depends on .NET version your application is running on.

Another quick reference is Microsoft Patterns and Practices article

There’re 4 ways to read and write XML

Parsing XML with special characters

It is pretty common to come across a scenario where we have to deal with special characters in XML. Like &, (, ), $, etc. With this fix the < be the only illeagal character.

YouTube .NET API

https://github.com/ablaze8/YouTubeApp

Transcript Generator

Today, I want to share a utility program I built. This little program, takes subtitle files, and spits out a nice crisp paragraph. I tested this program with a directory containing subtitles of 2 movies, and on the 8th second, I was looking at their transcripts. To test the file I/O operation, I took transcripts for a graduate level computer science course. It was organized in sections and sub-topics, totaling about 200 small clips. Within 3 seconds, I had my class notes, which I could use to share with a class, highlight important things being said in the lectures without typing a word!

One more thing, it is free and open-source, you can literally clone it and start using it right away.

Visit: https://subtitlestotranscript.wordpress.com, for for examples, documentation and GitHub repo.

C# String Extension & Helper Methods

I enjoyed spending some time after creating some very useful (at least to me 😛 ) C# helper functions for string operation. So here is the gist of it

LINQ to XML and XPath

An XML needs to be parsed – I was told the other day. My first questions from experience, how big the XML is going to be? Do we know the schema? The answer : It’s never going to be bigger than few lines, as we use it to store our application’s menu – which may or may not have child(ren). And yes we know the XML schema. Enough said.