Honestly it would be much easier if you could share your GitHub repo or code sample. I am not sure what is the problem just from the description you provided.

Do I completely misunderstand DoI, EntityFrameworkCore 5, or some basic coding feature?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

OK, thanks – you answered the part about performance and memory – good to know. I like the concept, I just have always used ints without thinking about it much, but I do see an advantage. It is a bit curious that for the Id field in the AspNetUsers table, Microsoft chose to use nvarchar(450) instead of an int or guid.

Hi Kevin. Well, I am not sure if itnis a best practice, I don’t think so, but nevertheless I always used guids in my large projects and never had a single speed or memory problem. Yes, INT is smaller, but again, as I said, it works and it worked for me like a charm. I wouldn’t go here in pros and cons, you can find a lot abot that on Google, but I trust my expirience 🙂

I see you use the Guid datatype for primary keys and I do see a case for this. Is this Microsoft best practice? Aren’t ints faster than Guids (strings) and since they are PKs, they are used often in joins and you’d want the faster performance.

Thank you.

Sounds good.

No, we don’t have a hard copy. But it is not strictly online, once you buy it, it is yours with all the source code and bonuses.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Marinko. Just curious – is your book strictly online – no hard copy, right?

Hello Kevin. Thank you for the comment and for the support. About environment variables – This is much safer way of storing sensitive data, because you are not exposing them in a file such as appsettings.json which is deployed to the server. With env variables you can store your data on the machine itself and only your software can access it. You can see one example in the lunchsettins.json file in asp.net core project. There you have :

“environmentVariables”: {
“ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT”: “Development”
}

which sets this variable to the Development value. Of course, you don’t have to create it like this. You can use the command window to generate and populate env variable and then just use it in your app.

In our Ultimate ASP.NET Core Web API book, we have a great example of using env variable for the authentication with JWT.

I’m reading where you say:

But, we must state that using appsettings files to store connection string (or other sensitive data) isn’t the best practice, especially for the production environment. In such a case, the better way is to use environment variables.

I’m must not exactly sure what you mean by “environment variables” – can you provide an example?
Thanks very much for this great EF series!