Create .NET Core Projects with the Command Line

>> Did you know that the command
line is so powerful that you can
actually create.NET Core
projects within it?
Learn more on this episode
of Visual Studio Toolbox.
[MUSIC].
>> Hey everyone. Welcome
to Visual Studio Toolbox.
I'm your host, Leslie
Richardson coming to you
from my very professional
childhood bedroom studio.
Today, I am joined by Sayed Hashimi,
who is a Senior PM on the
ASP.NET team. Welcome, Sayed.
>> Hello. How's it going?
Definitely happy to be here.
Been on Visual Studio Toolbox
bunch of times in the past.
I always love coming out here to
show the latest and greatest.
Thanks very much for having me.
>> Yeah, welcome back.
Today, we are going to be talking
about creating.NET Core projects
on the command line, right?
>> Yeah, that's right.
What we're planning on doing is
basically creating
a series of videos.
The range of topics
will be we'll first
start out with how do you
create projects using.NET New.
Then we'll move on to using
community created templates from
both.NET New and Visual Studio.
Then we'll move on to then
start showing how to actually
create templates and how to
customize this for Visual Studio.
This is really just the first
video in that video series.
Just like what you mentioned,
in this video we'll be
focusing on using.NET New and
understanding the basics before
we get started on creating
our own templates here. Yeah.
>> Exciting. Why the command line?
What's the perk or why
should I make a.NET Core project
within the command line?
>> Yeah, sure. I think
that's a great question.
If we were to rewind
the clock like five,
six years back, before
there was.NET Core.
there was.NET Framework.
In that world everybody was
creating and building and developing
inside Visual Studio itself,
and I mean Visual Studio on Windows.
But now, with.NET Core,
we live in a different world.
If you're creating a project template
and if you want to
have the broad reach,
you need to surface that in
a way that can meet users
where they're at, right?
Today, users that will develop
with Visual Studio 2019
or maybe with Visual Studio
Code or Visual Studio for Mac,
there's also third party editors
out there like JetBrains Rider.
You can also customize
any editors like Sublime
and Notepad++ to also do
development with.NET Core.
The way that we've architected this
is we have what's called
the template engine.
You can think about
that as being like
the foundation that
everything would sit on.
We've got the template engine.
Then sitting directly on top of
that would be.NET New command
line and also, Visual Studio
and Visual Studio for Mac.
The idea is we can
create templates using
the template engine and
then we can surface
that in all the relevant locations.
If you create a template
with template engine,
you can get that to appear
in the.NET New command line.
It can also show up in
Visual Studio 2019,
Visual Studio for Mac.
Also, I believe Rider's got
that extensibility as well
where it will show these
community created templates.
To answer the question is
really you just need to meet
the users where they're at.
The people developing.NET
Core applications,
they're not only in
Visual Studio anymore,
they're in various different places.
Then also, I think one another
benefit is creating a template with
the template engine is very easy in
comparison to the
alternative technologies
that are available out there.
That's why I would say that.
You get the broadest reach.
Then it's also easier
to create and maintain
your templates if you author
them with the template engine.
>> Great. Yeah. I personally
enjoy using the command line and
I always forget that
you can actually create
a project in the command
line to begin with.
Can you show us how it works?
>> That's right. Yeah. Let's let's
go check out the Terminal here.
Let me get my Terminal
app opened up here.
I got a helicopter flying in the
background Sorry guys about that.
First, let's just explore .NET
New..NET New is delivered
with the .NET SDK.
Let's just go ahead and execute.NET
New and see what we get out of this.
If you run .NET New,
it'll go ahead and show you the
various different templates
that are available to be used.
Here we can see I've got a
mix of different things.
Most of these are built in templates,
but we can also see I've got
some community and custom
templates installed here as well.
At the bottom, there's
also some examples here,
so let's take a look at that.
If I were to do .NET New,
and then we would
give it the name for
the template that we
want to create here.
That's what we see
here in short name.
There's various
different options here.
Let's go in and explore
the MVC option here.
If I was to do.NET New MVC,
I could also get help that's
specific for this
particular template here.
You can do a.NET New,
template name, -h to get the
template's specific help.
You can see we've got
a bunch of different
parameters here as well.
The help will basically spit
out the different parameters
that you've got here.
Then we can go from there.
There's also some
common parameters here.
Where are we at? Those are here.
Some of these that we'll be
taking a look at is output.
Then the install we'll be
looking at in the next video.
There's also a name value here.
We'll be using name and output
here during this video.
Let's go and create a directory here.
I'll say demo one.
Let's go and go into that.
If I just wanted to
create an MVC project,
I can just do .NET New
MVC and then that'll
go ahead and create a project right
in this particular folder here.
Yes. It creates the
project and then it will
call NuGet to restore them.
Let's take a look at
the contents here.
You can see I created an MVC project
and it's named demo1.csproj.
It got this name from the
name of the folder here.
If you don't specify a name,
then the folder name
will be used by default.
That's the idea here.
Let's also take a look at
this demo project real quick,
or actually, sorry about that,
let's take a look at the program.cs.
One thing that I want
to point out to you.
Excuse me. The project
name was demo1.
We can see that when I
created this project,
the name space was customized
for that project name.
Now it's created demo1 here.
>> Nice.
>> Yeah. We'll talk a lot more
about how these replacements work and
all that stuff in our
additional videos here.
>> Yeah. That's exactly
what I'd expect if I
were creating a template
via Visual Studio.
>> Yeah, that's right.
The mechanism that's
used here is the
same with dotnet new as
well as with Visual Studio.
There's another way that
I could do that as well.
Let me pick a different
template here,
so let's say webapp,
that's the name of another
template that we have.
Instead of just going into
the directory itself,
you can specify the directory
that it should be created at,
and then that will also be
the name of the project.
I can say, dotnet new
webapp MyCoolWeb.
Let's go ahead and create that.
Now, that will create it into a
folder that's called MyCoolWeb.
Let's just take a look at the
startup.cs for this one, I guess.
We'll see that the namespace for
this one has also been
set to MyCoolWeb.
Now, we've got a project
that builds and runs.
I can verify that by
doing dotnet build.
Then we could also run
this project with dotnet run or
we can go ahead and load this up
into Visual Studio or
whatever editor or IDE
that users prefer here.
That was one way of doing it too.
We also mentioned that we would
show the name option there.
Let me go into this
new folder, demo2.
If I say dotnet new webapi,
and then if I give it a name,
I can say MyWebApi.
Now, that should create
it in this folder,
but with the name MyWebApi,
or in the folder called MyWebApi,
and then the name would be MyWebApi.
If I was to inspect the program or
the startup or the weather forecast,
we would see that that
namespace has been
declared appropriately as well.
Let's take another look through
the help real quick
and see if there's
any additional options here
that we haven't talked about.
One was dotnet new list.
Let's go ahead and take a
look at that real quick.
dotnet new -l. For dotnet new- l,
this would just list
out all the templates
that have been installed here.
Like I mentioned, I do
have some custom templates
installed here so if you
see something different,
then that means that
I've just installed
something additional that you
might not have on your box.
>> Yeah, I don't recall
seeing sayed tool on mine.
>> Yeah, that's right. Let
me explain this output here.
Here, we've got the
name of the template.
This is just a user-friendly name.
Here's the short name.
That was the name that
I was using before,
we saw MVC, webapp, and webapi.
Those are here, MVC webapp,
and webapi is right there.
Here, we can also see
the language options.
Let's say if I was an
F# or VB developer,
I can take a look at this
language column to tell me,
what templates are available for
that particular language as well.
Then the tags are just categories.
If I was interested in a console
app, I could do console.
Let's do this, dotnet new -l -h.
What help is available for list here?
We can see that I can
filter by language,
and we can also filter by type here.
dotnet new -l -lang F#.
This should display
only the F# templates,
and then similarly for VB.
I think we can also do
something similar for the tags,
I believe, or the
type here, basically.
If I was to say, --type Console.
That one looks like it did enter.
Oh, sorry about that, my
bad. This is different.
One thing that I forgot
to mention here was on
the list of templates
that were output here,
there's a variety of
different things.
The vast majority of these
are project templates,
but we do have a few item
templates here like gitignore,
globaljson, so on and so forth.
That's where the type
filter comes in.
If I was to list the project,
I can view dotnet new
-l --type Project.
This will just show me all
the project templates.
If I wanted to see only the item
templates to replace
the type of item there,
you go back and see how
can we filter on the tag.
That might not actually be possible
here to actually filter on
the tags here but in Visual Studio,
these tags will appear
and you can actually
filter in Visual Studio there.
>> That is pretty sweet. I had
no idea you could get all
of the same functionality
that we would if we were to open
Visual Studio for the first
time just in the command line.
>> Yeah, that's right.
Then the one thing that I
forgot to mention here was
everything that I showed here
was with built-in templates.
But you would get the
same exact functionality
with custom templates as well.
If I were to do dotnet
new sayedweb -h,
I would get the template
specific help for that custom
template that I've created here.
You get the exact same experience,
whether it's a built-in
template created by
Microsoft or if it's a template
that you created yourself,
or if a third-party
company created it,
you'd get the same
exact experience here.
It's not like we're special casing
the Microsoft templates here.
We got the same exact experience
all across the board.
>> That's really cool.
Makes you feel more
official with the
templates that you create.
>> Yeah, definitely.
That was some feedback
that we have received a lot
over the course of the
last several years
was the template authors,
they want their templates to
appear in a first-class way.
So when we create a dotnet new,
we made sure to fulfill that promise,
and we're also trying to do the
same thing in Visual Studio,
and Visual Studio for Mac as well.
>> That is exciting stuff.
>> Yeah. I think that's
really about it here.
We talked about how
can we use .NET new
and how can we use the
help system to explore,
how to learn more about the command,
and also, some basics here.
I think that's really
it for this video.
In the next videos that follow,
we'll start seeing how can we install
community templates and then use
those in dotnet new as
well as Visual Studio.
>> That is some good
stuff, I can't wait.
>> Great.
>> Just to close out,
you mentioned that you need the .NET
SDK for the command
line functionality.
Where can users go to make
sure they have that installed?
>> Usually, I just go to GitHub,
actually, to get that.
But I think the easiest way is
to just do .NET Core download,
and that'll take them to
the right place here.
So just dotnet.Microsoft.com to
get the latest download of.NET Core.
>> Can't wait.
>> Everything that I'm showing
here applies to both .NET Core
3.1 as well as .NET Core 5.
>> Sweet. That is very exciting.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you. Tune in next time
when we talk more about
the awesomeness you
can do with .NET
templates and projects.
Until then, happy coding.
[MUSIC]