One ASP.NET: Nancy.Templates for Visual Studio

I hope you've updated to Visual Studio 2012.2 and picked up Web Essentials because we're continuing to add goodness all the time. As we march forward with the One ASP.NET vision, so does the community. One of the major goals has been to make it easier for the community to not only make templates but also live alongside ASP.NET templates as peers. This has been historically hard. It's still too complex, in fact, but it's easier than before. I'm hoping that one day soon making templates will be as easy as making and sharing NuGet packages.

Not only is most of ASP.NET open source, but so are the Azure SDKs, NuGet and more. However, there's a large and rich world of open source frameworks and projects that some companies never get to use either because their company isn't into Open Source or because they won't use code that doesn't come from Microsoft.

Additionally, Microsoft, IMHO, has done a poor job (as a collective) letting developers know that there are options and options are good. Personally, I don't care if you use Entity Framework, or Web Forms, or MVC or Web API. You can use NHibernate, Nancy, Simple.Web, ServiceStack and Open Rasta. It makes no difference to me or my organization. If you are happy and using .NET, then I'm happy and that's great. Microsoft want you to use Azure and Windows, I'm sure, but after that ultimately the rest is just the details of your stack. You should explore the options available and work within your organization to be successful.

On the topic of options, NancyFx is an open source web framework for .NET that uses the Ruby Framework "Sinatra" as its inspiration. (Get it? Frank Sinatra's daughter is Nancy Sinatra.)

A few days ago (with some gentle prodding, and some great team effort) the NancyFx team created a VSIX to integrate the NancyFx Web Framework into the Visual Studio project dialog. (You can also get NancyFx from NuGet, of course.)

It's totally simple from your point of view, as it should be. Download the VSIX, and double click on it. Done.

Now, in Visual Studio, just File | New Project and  you've got more choices!

Nancy is a very lightweight and flexible framework for web sites and services. You don't even need ASP.NET proper. You can self-host in your own services or exe, or host within ASP.NET. You can use Razor syntax or choose other View Engines.

Here's Hello World:

public class SampleModule : Nancy.NancyModule
{
    public SampleModule()
    {
        Get["/"] = _ => "Hello World!";
    }
}

Interesting and very concise convention, eh? The Get["/"] syntax is a route, saying that an HTTP GET for / should be handled by this => anonymous method. It's all C#, mind you!

Here's the next step, passing a model into a View:

 public class SampleModule : NancyModule
 {
     public SampleModule()
     {
          Get["/"] = parameters => {
          var person = new Person {
                Id = 1,
                Name = "Scott Hanselman",
                Content = "Lorem ipsum...",
                Tags = {"c#", "aspnet", "oss", "nancy"}
          ;

          return View["Index", person];
     };
  }
}

Nice, eh? Very familiar if you're comfortable with ASP.NET MVC and general MVC-style frameworks. 

If you want to return Json, you can take an object and call AsJson() like this:

Get["/person"] = parameters =>
{
    var person = new 
    {
        Id = 1,
        Name = "Scott Hanselman",
        Content = "Lorem ipsum..."
    };
    return Response.AsJson(person);
};

There's samples you can see at http://samples.nancyfx.org and you are encouraged to add your own sample. Just File | New Project, and make a Nancy Demo Application and follow the instructions.

NancyFx has a great community of users and you'll  often find them chatting on Jabbr or in their Google Group.

Kudos and congrats to the Nancy team for being awesome, and for making these templates.

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