Every day I’m hustling consoling

This is a bit of a “Ya basic!” post but I thought I would share all the same.

I end up writing a LOT of .NET Console Apps…a quick test here, a demo there and some automation every now and again.

Every single time I do "File => New Project" or dotnet new console…well NOT TODAY!

I’ve been really trying to share most of what I do through GitHub and I have been making a conscious effort to this using some basic principals…no hard coded secrets in code.

There is actually more of a story here, a couple of years back I would use Azure DevOps (VSTS back then) and found that private repos actually made me a lazy dev, nothing in config everything hard coded!! This is a shame as I there is a few project in there that would have been useful to make public but I ran out of time and enthusiasm to kill all the git history and migrate them before they got stale.

It wasn’t like I was writing anything that made it close to production but I wanted to start treating my code like this so I could better relate to what others were having to deal with.

Ok…I’ll get to the point soon, stick with me this is good for the soul.

So I need to build a test or in this case a repro for a problem that we are seeing, right dotnet new console

Then I would spend time reading about how to do configuration in .NET Core again and reading the same article and scaffolding up all the things…it was Groundhog Day every time!

After finding out about .NET Generic Host which was introduced in 2.1, I decided it was time to build a project template that I could reuse.

Custom Templates are super easy, I’m mad I didn’t spend time on this before as I was only a couple of hours.

So I create my Console App with all the setup I need and just a .template.config folder and template.json file and i can run dotnet new --install <<Path to Project folder>>

Couple of things I found out:

• Make sure you get rid of any build folders obj and bin need to be gone otherwise you just get compiled dll files when you create a new project from the template
• If you are going to build a nuget then copy from the source files into a new folder as the package process does a build and restore which creates the directories and causes the issue in the above point.
• If you are installing the template from the local machine, drop the trailing \ on the folder path otherwise the install will fail dotnet new -i "C:\somepath\noBackSlashOnTheEndOfThisFolder"
• Use "preferNameDirectory": "true" in template.json so the project gets named after the parent directory or –name parameter
• Use "sourceName": "<<Your Namespace>>" in template.json to rename the namespace after the parent directory or –name parameter
• Use nuget pack not dotnet pack as doesn’t seem to like the dealing with folder paths

That’s it, hope this helps someone, but will probably just end up be a reference for me when I come back and update this to .NET Core 3.0!

Link to the GitHub repo is here Link to Nuget package is here