ASP.Net 5 and Ubuntu

For now, we will create a shortcut to create an MVC project.



Then, fill in the corresponding command.



Finally, using the « Preferencies » menu, disable the default submenu creation.



This new shortcut we just created is now available when you click right in the file explorer.



When you need it, just follow the prompt.



For more information on Nautilus-Actions, you can find it here. About Yeoman and ASP.NET, see the original article and the NPM package page. We are now getting further and create shortcuts for files that need user inputs.

We will focus on the MVC View creation. The corresponding command is this.
Zenity

Zenity is a tool that you can use to print dialog windows from a shell script. It should be already installed if you use the last version of Ubuntu. If this is not the case, just run this command.
If you run the next command, you should see an input popup asking for a filename.
To redirect this input to our Yeoman command, nothing is easier. Just use a variable to store this value and send it as a parameter.


If we observe the file explorer, the new view was effectively created with the filename we specified in the dialog window.



We will create a script file “createMvcView.sh” wherein we will store the script we just built.



Then we need to add the execution right to this file properties.



As for the “new project” prompt, let's create a new Nautilus-Actions command.



This time, we will specify the bash script's path we just created.



If we invoke the contextual menu of the file explorer, we can see our command.



You now have all the skills to add shortcuts to the other file type creations available using this Yeoman generator. To go further, I invite you to explore this GitHub repository that allow you to easily install a complete list of these shortcuts, using the principle we learned, on Ubuntu.

We will now overview how to use NuGet, the packages manager usually integrated to Visual Studio, using command line.

Nuget CLI

You can install the NuGet CLI and authorize HTTPS access using the following command.
You can then list all the packages available using this other one.


Get Bootstrap

To add Bootstrap to your project from a NuGet package, just run this command at the location we created our application earlier, using “yo aspnet”.


So we are able to use the same packages as in Visual Studio, except for the Mono and ASP.NET 5 compatibility, to develop using the .NET Framework. With the .NET Core, this packages list should become increasingly cross-platform.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a microcomputer whose first model appeared in February 2012. Recently, the second version was released with very interesting characteristics for the same price of approximatively 40$: a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU with 1GB RAM.



Linux ARMv7

After several searches, I found an Ubuntu derived distribution compatible with the Raspberry. To install this image to your SD card, just follow this guide. When it's done, let's connect your Raspberry to a power supply and plug in a screen and a keyboard. The system already has the username / word: “linaro” / “linaro”.



We will install Xfce, the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Gnome terminal, even if it is not essential, in order to have a more user friendly workspace. To do this, run the following command.


This installation should take several minutes to finally display a desktop environment.



We will start by creating a new partition on the disk image we just installed (limited to 3Go), or we risk to encounter some space disk issues while we will install all our dependencies. We will use Gparted.



ASP.NET 5

Since we already saw how to run ASP.NET 5 on Ubuntu, use the following script to run on the new partition we just created.
To check that our installation went well, just run this command to list all the versions of the .NET Framework available.


Mono Version

Exceptions may have occurred due to the Mono version that could not be recent enough to run KVM, KPM or Kestrel. The exceptions I encountered are very several and various. If it happens, I recommend you to install the last version of Mono available on GitHub, compiling from the sources.
Once you have done that you should prefix all your commands by “LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$$path$$” where “$$path$$” is the last Mono installation directory, like the following.
Run on the Raspberry

To get our MVC sample project, we will use the official GitHub one.
Finally, run the following command using the HelloMvc location.


Conclusion

As you can see, ASP.NET 5 was designed to be run on several platforms and it's already available on the Alpha 3 version. With this, the Raspberry Pi has greatly improved its performances and its compatibility due to its architecture.

Cross-platform is not yet available without Mono, because of the .NET Core Framework development still pending, but we can already see what ASP.NET 5 will look like on that platform. Microsoft teams, .NET / ASP.NET / Visual Studio, realized a wonderful work in order to optimize and open .NET development to new frontiers.