Forget Controllers and Minimal APIs in .NET! 

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you can do the same with minimal apis

Same here my man. But then again i have been writing APIs since active-x lel so who am i to speak haha. I tend to feel a lot of people get always overly obsessed with any new tech / pattern just because it's shiny, forgetting the business needs and the rest of the team(s) that may need to look at your sh**. I write deletable code and that is way more important than confusing a load of people.

@@megachill Getting code to production is what brings you money - not shiny code that uses all the js frameworks released last week :)

I have found that minimal API + dependency injection leads to bloated method signatures. FastendPoints enhanced with some project specific base classes leads to a happy place between minimal APIs and controllers.

@@flibbertigibbet6324 if you're worried about bloated constructors, use the new Primary Constructors. Otherwise, I don't see how method signatures get bloated because of injection.

Not to mention minimal APIs are more universally adopted and you don't have to worry about continued support in 5 years from now.

i think the same as you

I feel the same way about minimal. There are probably circumstances where they're good for quick implementations. I just don't see them as a replacement for a controller. It's like people just keep jumping to the next thing because it's the next thing and they get bored easily.

@@cew182but they are for Rest APIs? MVC Controllers just has a bunch of stuff that straight up has no value a lot of the time Just because it works doesn’t mean you shouldn’t migrate to a better tool

Why would you prefer controllers? I just don’t see how they’re not worse when it comes to a an API service than minimal or this

@@aj0413_ I don't know where you got this idea that one is better than the other, but it's flat out incorrect. Not even Microsoft claims that, nor do they push people one way or the other. They provide both options and clearly state it's a matter of picking what works best for you. They don't even have feature parity at the moment, Minimal APIs are still missing features like Model Validation through Data Annotations. Now, we could argue all day if you rather do Data Annotations or FluentValidation, but again it's just a matter of preference. This idea that fluent language extensions and definitions by extension is somehow more readable than class level definitions or attributes is non-sensical. It gets very verbose, very quickly and when you have to work on a large project with multiple teams, you'll understands how Controllers can keep your code much cleaner and easier to navigate. Out here in the real world, most businesses don't have the privilege of having 10x developers and all of these new world ways of doing things require a very good understanding of clean code and SOLID principles. To sum it all up, for smaller projects, smaller code bases and smaller teams, yeah Minimal APIs would probably be my choice... for an actual enterprise level project where you have to deal with churn, upskilling people, multiple levels os seniority and quality... I'll take the more restrictive nature of Controllers any day of the week :)

This was exactly why I came to the comment section to see if anybody else said that.

Scaling humans is much harder than scaling computers Optimize for software engineering not low-level hardware This architecture doesn’t scale up domain knowledge over systems and is only useful in the smallest of projects It lacks any Cohesive grouping amongst your domain functions (ie: endpoints) and creates a major bloat in your codebase - MUCH more precious than the few milliseconds that I’m sure makes zero difference to your end users. Optimize for your engineers instead.

@@mbradea I smell bullshit 🤣

@@mbradea It doesn't provide any grouping but It also doesn't prevent you from implementing one. If you feel like your project gets too large group endpoints by folders/namespaces. If you need shared functionality or shared configuration across group of endpoints write abstract base class.

I just began working on my pico-API project. You can chain everything into one line. :)

Exactly! I’m still struggling to justify even minimal Api over controllers, those talking about performance are not doing serious work, it is negligeable

because a lot of snowflakes works at microsoft and they love tidy code so they could sleep better and force it on us. This code is MUCH harder to maintain then 1 controller file that have evrything in it :)

it will stop when we get to the point of 1 atom per file

I agree. I really don’t like inheritance with “hidden” optionally overridden methods that you just have to know exist to override. Controllers handle query and route parameters more elegantly, imo, as arguments to a method.

Can't you just place your controller, repo, dtos, etc in the same folder to achieve the same?

Minimal APIs are the definition of hacky lol. No reason not to do it properly with controllers if "hackish" is what you want to avoid

@@maskettaman1488 to me they don't seem hackish

@@maskettaman1488 yeah exactly Forget this new NOISE

@@maskettaman1488lol controllers r hackish. “Hey look! Let’s use a concept related to UI to drive an API! Where’s my View???”

​​@@maskettaman1488minimal api is functional programming. It's different than controller which is closer to oop.

Exactly, it really doesn’t need to be any more complicated than this. I sometimes think people have forgotten how to code.

Yep thats what I do

Mediahahahah

You don't have to. You can still return IResult, but I like specifying what my API might return in a union way

@@nickchapsas Thanks.

It's a not verbose and less flexible, but that single feature is one of the best things in FE imo. Simply because your generated API docs now always correctly reflect the actual possible return types. ActionResult only gives you the 200 OK, and you still need to add a lot of redundant attributes for the remaining possible error types.

How many projects use stuff like MediatR, XUnit, NUnit, FluentAssertions, etc.. ?

you gain some, you lose some. your app has a dependency that may or may not be deprecated and source code is exposed but to have your own code means you have to maintain it.

I've been following this project since the beginning, and while the amount of work that has gone into it is impressive, it's still mostly one individual who isn't getting paid to work on this. It's also different than many packages, it's closer to it's own framework if you go all in. Given that, I would use it for personal projects, but couldn't recommend it for business facing projects and take the risk of requiring a major rewrite because it has become abandonware.

​@@MooseVonStanley i guess in that case it falls to us the community to continue its support (whenever we are in mood of course). i mean isn't it worth it? i don't have much experience as a software engineer but it could be a boon to everybody right?

@@bric305 Notice the difference. Compare those libraries to something that reinvents a perfectly functioning wheel in .NET

You can just use request. Fast endpoints will map query parameters by name

Handled really well. Read the doc, it's easy.

@@CapzTube oo wow docs ....ok

He likes it due to how it improves organization of the project. It works on the concept of low coupling high cohesion. By only having one endpoint per class you only inject the dependencies that matter to that specific endpoint. All of the code that is only relevant to that endpoint can all live in the same location (folder or file). Getting speed benefits by it using minimal APIs as its backing is just the cherry on top. There is an equivalent controllers based project called ApiEndpoints.

Fast End Points nudges you into the Request Endpoint Response patten which, once you overcome the learning curve, produces a much cleaner API since you naturally consider the input, the handlers and the output. Controllers were designed for MVC. You can make amazing API's with controllers but you are fighting its true nature. MVC nudges you into reusing the input as output, and sharing models across endpoints (does your create endpoint have an unused "id" field because it's also used by the edit endpoint? ) You can of course avoid making a mess and write an amazing controller based API - but the framework is not helping you make good decisions, you're just a good engineer over coming it's shortfalls. If you took new devs and taught some controllers and some fastendpoints I'm positive the fast endpoints group would write a better api, and write it faster. The only thing going for controllers is familiarity, the large user base and history. It doesn't actually do anything better.

@@JSullivan1978 ​sounds ok for APIs which have less than a dozen endpoints (in which case I'd argue it's better to just use minimal API instead of unnecessarily adding a package), but you still gonna prefer it when you have an enterprise-level API with hundreds of endpoints?

​@@alexandermercer5363Are you kidding? My company maintains a 300+ endpoint medical system made solely on Fastendpoints. Best decision we've made.

@@JSullivan1978 I'm not sure I agree that MVC nudges you to reuse the request model for your response. I've got an app I'm writing now with probably 50 api calls so far, and I feel like 50+ separate api endpoint files would hurt my brain.

They have a documentation for this. You also can add a Swagger and Authentication. But if for Controllers and Minimal Api you can find the examples everywhere, but for Fast Endpoints you have to dig up in documentation by yourself.

asp.versioning can also be worked fine with fastendpoints, it is that in my project.

Does anyone \*actually\* use api versioning? like for realsies, and stick to it? It has to be vanishingly rare. But anyway you'd just make it a route param: "{apiVersion}/foos/bar".

It comes with an auth add on. I use it for creating and consuming JWT tokens and it does the job.

@@JSullivan1978 What do you use, if I may ask?

Hell yeah it does!

It has very good NSwag support, with a decent defaults and many extensions for tweaking the output. When using fastendpoints I find the swagger output is way ahead of API's written with Controllers. Controller based api's normally miss documenting how errors are handled since no one makes this a priority.

We don't necessarily want to separate each method into a separate class, but we do want to separate each endpoint into its own class.

What is so bad about a class?

Last time I checked, the Configure() method is only ever run once. Ctor on the other hand is called per each request which allows me to inject services from the DI container. They have benchmark results on their website you can check.

@@duznt-xizt That's even worse then, if we have to resolve every dependency just to configure the endpoint.

@@petewarner1077 I maintain a medical system monolith with over 300 endpoints and the application starts in about a second. App is only restarted about once a month, so no real impact from cold boot speed. Btw, I'm using their type discovery source generator to avoid the assembly scanning/reflection cost.

@@duznt-xizt No doubt a lot of effort has gone into the performance of it, and I won't rule out using it future if necessary. I just don't understand why regurgitate an idea that was flawed 10 years go of creating a bunch of instances of classes and all of their dependencies in order to obtain configuration data at startup, and then throw them away. Annotating with attributes and having code-gen write the registration code would've been the better choice.

@@petewarner1077 I understand where you're coming from, but I personally consider attribute annotations as visual clutter for config. Back when I was using MVC Controllers, I used to have 10-15 lines of attribute decorations on controller methods, which IMHO is horrendous from a code readability perspective. This lib has brought back the joy in writing backend apps for me 😊

You don't need to write Match in every endpoint anyway. That's a thing I am using, it has nothing to do with FastEndpoints

@@nickchapsas yep its non related with fast endpoints I just wanted to point out a practice of my 😂

I switched from VS in 2019, when Rider became actually usable. I have an old video on the topic but I think I need to remake it

Rdier is cool with features, but laggy

@@timur2887 in guessing it's the only game in town for the Mac underclass.

I guess you lack the experience to understand what experience means lol

@@mbradea Having 10000+ hours with controllers and 500+ with FastEndpoints I can say, for MY use cases that Fast endpoints is better. For reference I generally build high use (10,000 RPM +) API endpoints.

A somewhat friendly unique identifier. In his example it's the name of the movie+year. That can be used in the URL instead of the internal ID for example

@@junior.santana Thanks bud!

Might as well just create you own programming language, I mean what if Microsoft decides to do all those things 🤷‍♂️ Best to also use customer resources on building framework and library rather than building their actual product 😊 Not advocating for their specific library though - for me it doesn't solve anything or make existing things better 👍

@@kabal911 swagger is about to gone ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8xEkVmqlr4I.html

​@@kabal911Don't tell me you compared a multi-billion dollar company to a single developer who doesn't get paid for this library 💀

@@CabbageYe nope, I didn't compare anything 🤷‍♂️ I made a comment as absurd as “don't use 3rd party libraries, just in case you can no longer use them”

You cross that road when you get to that road. Until then you don't reinvent the wheel.

Do you have a usecase for AOT?

@@nickchapsas I will prepare a test case and send it. My latest projects are in AOT exclusively. A little pain in the ass due to the lack of FluentValidation (absence of reflection sucks), however, I stay here for performance exclusively.

You can. Out of the box it supports Microsofts "HttpResults" so you can return Typed "Results". Defind the endpoint like so: public sealed class Endpoint : Endpoint Inside the function it's "typed" and you can return any of these results and they map ... and it wont compile if you try to return something else. I use C# as a client (Blazor) and it understands this endpoint and can also map the results. My tests also know what they will get ... even swagger understands the possible outputs.

Google "Fast Endpoints Brad Jolicoeur". There's an article which explains a lot which this video doesn't.

It's been around for year

Not new. It's been in a stable release for 3 years and has a decent community around it.

@@DanWalshTV and yet you shouldnt recommend this to anyone trying to work professionally with this technology, especially juniors. Controllers in any remotely large company are the norm.

@@naughtiousmaximus7853 what did those companies do before controllers existed? Norms change we shouldn't do something just because it is the norm, we should be willing to grow and adapt to better ways of doing things.

@@evancombs5159 Thats cool but it isnt how world operates in 90% of cases.

🧢🧢🧢

You can always create something that works in your specific use case extremly well. The problem is making it generic and extensible, and maintaining it. Also, @@nickchapsas What does that mean?

@@guiorgy he meant it's cap(lie)

Servicestack APIs are insanely better thought out than this, IMHO.

@@nickchapsas How about measure actual performance? That seems pretty relevant when making a video on seemingly something that definitely won't be faster?

What are you talking about?

Glad I’m not the only one seeing this.

I also don't love how every video is like, right at the 8 minute monetization mark, even when the video is something that could be demonstrated clearly in like 2min. Just like FastEndpoints, there's a lot of needless bloat going on here in order to hit some marketing metric that's directly hurting the quality of the product.

@@andrewshirley9240 Could you identify exactly what parts you think are bloat?

postman will still have your back

LoL, there's a reason why the REPR pattern is superior. Time to re-educate mate 😋