Intro

A ASP.NET Core MVC project setup in WSL Debian done in a day, with a focus on using lightweight and fast tools to set up a full stack development environment in less than a few minutes.

About

Rent Some Wheels is a web application that allows for the management of vehicles, clients, and rental contracts, as described below:

• Vehicle Registration: Enable the registration of vehicles with information such as brand, model, license plate, year of manufacture, and fuel type.
• Client Registration: Enable the registration of clients, including data such as full name, email, phone number, and driving license.
• Rental Contract Registration: Enable the creation of rental contracts, associating a client with a vehicle and including fields for start and end dates of the rental.
• Listing of Vehicles, Clients, and Contracts: Enable the visualization of vehicle, client, and contract lists, showing the status of the vehicles (available or rented).

Overview of Tech Stack

• OS: Debian 12 (WSL setup in Windows 11)
• Platform: ASP.NET Core MVC (.NET Core 8.0)
• Backend: C#
• Frontend: Blazor, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Database: SQL Server
• Database Handler: Entity Framework (ORM)
• Approach: Code-First

Validations

Vehicle Registration

• Mandatory Fields:

  • Brand
  • Model
  • License Plate
  • Year of Manufacture
  • Fuel Type

• Business Rules:

  • Year of Manufacture: The manufacturing year cannot be later than the current year.
  • License Plate: The license plate must be unique (no two vehicles can have the same plate). The license plate follows the current Portugal format.

Client Registration

• Mandatory Fields:

  • Full Name
  • Email
  • Phone Number
  • Driving License

• Business Rules:

  • Email: Must be unique in the system (no two clients can have the same email).
  • Phone Number: Must contain only numbers and have a valid phone number format. The phone number follows the current Portugal format.

Rental Contract Registration

• Mandatory Fields:

  • Client: Must select a client from the list (required).
  • Vehicle: Must select a vehicle from the list (required).
  • Start Date, End Date, Initial Mileage: Required.

• Business Rules:

  • Start Date: Must be a valid date and cannot be earlier than the current date.
  • End Date: Must be later than the start date.

Listing of Vehicles, Clients, and Contracts

• Business Rules:
  • Vehicle Status (Available/Rented): The status must be updated automatically based on rental contracts. If the vehicle is currently rented, it should be marked as "Rented." Otherwise, "Available."

Development Setup

Coded using Visual Studio Code instead of the more common Visual Studio for these types of projects, since VS Code is a lot faster to install and auto-installs the needed extensions for using a remote connection to a WSL Debian environment where a lot of CLI is applied to quickly and easily set up the project, to showcase the multi-platform compatibility that .NET Core allows.

Setup Instructions

After a wsl install -d Debian in PowerShell and creating a user inside the new Debian terminal, the following commands were used, by order:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y wget gpg

wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/12/packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
rm -rf packages-microsoft-prod.deb
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/12/mssql-server-2022.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mssql-server.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y dotnet-sdk-8.0 mssql-server mssql-tools unixodbc-dev git

sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup

echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef

dotnet new mvc -n "RentSomeWheels" | code RentSomeWheels/
dotnet add package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer
dotnet add package Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.CodeGeneration.Design

dotnet watch run

All these commands will:

• Update all installed packages
• Install wget, git
• Use wget and dpkg to add list of Microsoft packages
• Install .NET 8.0 SDK, SQL Server & tools
• Go through SQL Server setup
• Add to PATH environment some missing commands
• Install .NET Entity Framework globally
• Create a .NET project using ASP.NET Core MVC template
• Enter to project directory in VS Code
• Use .NET CLI to install required packages
• Build & Run the project with hot reload so you can start making changes in code and view them instantly

How to run

Make sure you have .NET 8.0 SDK + Entity Framework + SQL Server installed, and change in appsettings.json the connection string in "RentSomeWheelsContext" to a SQL Server database that is up and running, or create a new one using the following info:

• Server = localhost;
• Database = RentSomeWheelsDB;
• User Id = sa;
• Password = Ola123..;

Then use the following commands in terminal to build & run the first time:

    dotnet ef migrations add InitialCreate
    dotnet ef database update
    dotnet run

TODO

• Review the Model classes, and describe validations with code snippets.
• Add UML Documentation and a Docs/ folder
  • Use Case Diagram
  • Class Diagram
  • Sequence Diagram
  • Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD)
  • Activity Diagram
• Create unit tests with XUnit
• Add more validations to inputs
• Maybe add parameter mileage to Vehicle? And input the initial mileage in a new Rental Contract based on the Vehicle current mileage
• Install & configure Docker