When developing web applications using ASP.NET Core or ASP.NET Core MVC, it’s common to encounter repetitive patterns in your code, especially when implementing dependency injection (DI). For instance, multiple controllers may inject the same set of services in a similar manner. This repetition leads to code redundancy and violates the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, making your codebase harder to maintain and extend over time.
To address this issue, you can use a custom base controller to centralize and streamline the injection of dependencies across your application. By abstracting the shared logic into a base class, you can minimize repetitive DI code, simplify your controllers, and make your project more modular and maintainable. This article explores the concept of DI code redundancy and demonstrates how to create a base controller to reduce duplication effectively.
Let’s start by setting up an ASP.NET Core MVC project in Visual Studio 2019. If you don’t already have Visual Studio installed, you can download it from the official Microsoft website. Once installed, follow these steps to create a new project:
- Launch Visual Studio and click “Create a new project.”
- In the “Create a new project” dialog, select “ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)” from the available templates.
- Click “Next” and configure your project details, such as the project name and location.
- On the “Additional Information” screen, select the appropriate target framework (e.g., .NET 5.0) and leave the other options as default (e.g., authentication type as “None”).
- Click “Create” to generate your project.
Once the project is created, you’ll use it to refactor DI code and implement a base controller. By leveraging this approach, you can significantly reduce redundancy while improving the maintainability and readability of your controllers. With this foundation in place, you’re ready to explore practical examples of how to achieve a more streamlined and DRY-compliant DI setup in ASP.NET Core MVC.