Using ASP.NET Core with MS SQL Server and Scaffolding on Linux

This post assumes you have .NET Core SDK and Microsoft SQL Server installed on your machine. I'm using the latest version of .NET Core 1.1 (1.1.0-preview1-005077) and Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (RC1) on Ubuntu 17.04.

Creating a simple MVC app

Let's open the terminal and use the dotnet command with Individual authentication and LocalDB to have a nice boilerplate!

dotnet new mvc --auth Individual --use-local-db true -o BlogPost

Now, we just need to change the connection string inside appsettings.json to something like:

"DefaultConnection": "Server=localhost;Database=your-db-name;Trusted_Connection=False;MultipleActiveResultSets=true;user id=sa;password=your-sophisticated-password"

and Ta-Da! We can use MS SQL Server with ASP.NET Core on Linux! For more information about connection strings, consult SQL Server Connection Strings for ASP.NET Web Applications.

Scaffolding with aspnet-codegenerator

This version of .NET Core creates a .csproj with the required NuGet packages for scaffolding. Just run dotnet aspnet-codegenerator and have fun with it :D

If you can't use the latest preview release, then you may want to add System.Composition, Microsoft.Composition and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.CodeGeneration.Design packages to your project using the following commands:

dotnet add package System.Composition

dotnet add package Microsoft.Composition

dotnet add package Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.CodeGeneration.Design

Finally, Run dotnet restore followed by one of the following commands to see the available options to scaffold your views, controllers and areas :)

dotnet aspnet-codegenerator view -h

dotnet aspnet-codegenerator controller -h

dotnet aspnet-codegenerator area -h

I found myself creating a model (Say Post.cs) then executing the following command to scaffold a controller, views and the data context:

dotnet aspnet-codegenerator controller -name PostsController -m BlogPost.Models.Post -dc BlogPost.Models.PostContext --relativeFolderPath Controllers -scripts --useDefaultLayout

For more information, see SO's How to generate controller using dotnetcore command line, SO's Reference .NET 4.5 dll in .NET Core 1.1 csproj? and Visual Studio Code extension: ASP.NET Core Scaffolding.

A side note: There's a ticket opened on GitHub to track documenting aspnet-codegenerator. Let's hope it'll be published soon! I hope this post was helpful to you :)