Introducing an Application Framework For ASP.Net MVC

• Dependency Injection: ABP uses and provides a strong and conventional DI infrastructure. Since this class is an application service, it's conventionally registered to a DI container as transient (created per request). It can simply inject all dependencies (as IRepository<Task> in this sample).
• Repository: ABP can create a default repository for each entity (as IRepository<Task> in this example). The default repository has many useful methods as was FirstOrDefault used in this example. We can easily extend the default repository upon our needs. Repositories abstract DBMS and ORMs and simplifies data access logic.
• Authorization: ABP can check permissions. It prevents access to an UpdateTask method if the current user has no "updating task" permission or is not logged in. It simplifies authorization using declarative attributes but also has additional ways of authorization.
• Validation: ABP automatically checks if the input is null. It also validates all the properties of an input based on standard data annotation attributes and custom validation rules. If the request is not valid, it throws a proper validation exception.
• Audit Logging: User, browser, IP address, calling service, method, parameters, calling time, execution duration and some other informations are automatically saved for each request based on conventions and configurations.
• Unit Of Work: In ABP, each application service method is assumed as a unit of work as the default. It automatically creates a connection and begins a transaction at the beggining of the method. If the method was successfully completed without exception, then the transaction is commited and the connection is disposed of. Even this method uses different repositories or methods, all of them will be atomic (transactional). And all changes on entities are automatically saved when the transaction is commited. Thus, we don't even need to call the _repository.Update(task) method as shown here.
• Exception Handling: We almost never handle exceptions in ABP in a web application. All exceptions are automatically handled by default. If an exception occurs, ABP automatically logs it and returns a proper result to the client. For example, if this is an AJAX request, then it returns a JSON to the client to indicate that an error occured. It hides the actual exception from client unless the exception is a UserFriendlyException as used in this sample. It also understands and handles errors on the client side and shows an appropriate messages to users.
• Logging: As you see, we can write logs using the Logger object defined in the base class. Log4Net is used as the default but it's changable or configurable.
• Localization: Notice that we used an L method when throwing an exception. Thus, it's automatically localized based on the current user's culture. Surely, we're defining CouldNotFoundTheTaskMessage somewhere.
• Auto Mapping: In the last line, we're using ABP's MapTo extension method to map input properties to entity properties. It uses the AutoMapper library to do the mapping. Thus, we can easily map properties from one object to another based on naming conventions.
• Dynamic Web API Layer: TaskAppService is a simple class actually (there is even no need to deliver from ApplicationService). We generally write a wrapper Web API Controller to expose methods to JavaScript clients. ABP automatically does that at runtime. Thus, we can use application service methods directly from clients.
• Dynamic JavaScript AJAX Proxy: ABP creates JavaScript proxy methods to make calling application service methods just as simple as calling JavaScript methods on the client.

We can see the benefits of ABP in such a simple class. All these tasks normally require a significiant amount of time, but they are all automatically handled by ABP.

Beside this simple example, ABP provides a strong infrastructure and application model. Here, some other features of ABP are:

• Modularity: Provides a strong infrastructure to build reusable modules.
• Data Filters: Provides automatic data filtering to implement some patterns like soft-delete and multi-tenancy.
• Multi Tenancy: It supports single-database multi-customer style multi-tenancy.
• Setting Management: Provides a strong infrastructure to get/change application, tenant and user level settings.
• Unit & Integration Testing: It's built with testability in mind. Also provides base classes to simplify unit & integration tests.

Starting a new solution, creating layers, installing Nuget packages, creating a simple layout and a menu. All these are very time consuming stuff.

ASP.NET Boilerplate provides pre-built startup templates that make starting a new solution much easier. Templates support Single-Page Application (SPA) and Multi-Page MVC Application (MPA) architectures. Also, allows us to use various ORMs.

ASP.NET Boilerplate is developed on Github and distributed on Nuget. The easiest way to start with ABP is to create a startup template and follow the documentation.