This ASP.NET Web API poster is awesome!

tl;dr - It is very easy to write self-hosting C#/F# ASP.NET MVC/Web API application, without using any Visual Studio non-sense (templates, plugins, etc.)

Reading An overview of Project Katana (A HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READ) helped a lot understanding the relationship between the Microsoft web stack. OWIN is the spec laying out how to build middleware and web app in a chainable fashion. This is very similar to the apps concept in Express.js. Everything as small as authentication to as large as a web framework can be defined as a middleware.

Katana is an implementation of OWIN and related tools.

On top of this, you can then write ASP.NET MVC/Web API and host them as OWIN apps.

To self host a Web API app, there're two options,

  1. use OWIN selfhost (Microsoft.Owin.SelfHost)
  2. use Web API home brew selfhoting (System.Web.Http.SelfHost)

If #2 is chosen, then it's completely separated from the OWIN stack.

  • The core OWIN nuget package is OWIN
  • The core Katana nuget package is Microsoft.Owin
  • The OWIN self host package is Microsoft.Owin.SelfHost
  • The core ASP.NET Web API package is Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Core, but the assembly name is System.Web.Http (so f**king confusing)

Useful documents for developing Web API and self hosting:

Here's a vanilla Wep API application without any Visual Studio non-sense:

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namespace Foo
{
    using System;
    using System.Net;
    using System.Threading;
    using System.Linq;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Text;

    using Newtonsoft.Json;
    using System.Web.Http;
    using System.Web.Http.SelfHost;

    /// <summary>
    /// Main class
    /// </summary>
    public static class MainClass
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var addr = new Uri("http://localhost:8001");
            using (var config = new HttpSelfHostConfiguration(addr))
            {
                config.Routes.MapHttpRoute("default", "api/{controller}");
                using (var srv = new HttpSelfHostServer(config))
                {
                    srv.OpenAsync().Wait();
                    Console.WriteLine("Server started");

                    Console.ReadLine();
                    Console.WriteLine("done");
                }
            }
        }
    }

    public class ProductController : ApiController
    {
        public class Result
        {
            public int Code;
            public object Metadata;
        }

        [HttpPost]
        public Result Post([FromBody]int[] data)
        {
            return new Result
            {
                Code = 1,
                Metadata = data,
            };
        }
    }
}