Microsoft publishes ASP. Webhooks Preview Version

Microsoft recently released a preview of ASP. Webhooks, a library that can be used to create and use the Webhook feature. Webhooks supports MVC 5 and Webapi 2.

Webhook is a pattern that implements user-defined callback functions via HTTP. Customers can choose to subscribe to certain types of events and receive them as post requests when these events actually occur. One of the main points of Webhook is that it is implemented using HTTP, which means that the use or implementation of this technology does not require any new infrastructure support.

The ASP. NET Webhooks provides the base building blocks for Webhook's send and receive operations. At the receiving end, it provides a common model for receiving and processing events from the Webhook provider. On the sending side, it provides support for managing subscriptions and sending event functions.

Infoq conducted an interview with Henrik F Nielsen and Brady Gaster from the Microsoft ASP group to learn more details about the project.

InfoQ: What is the motivation to set up an ASP. NET Webhooks project?

There are two motives for the establishment of ASP. Webhooks

1. Webhooks provides a protocol pattern for the integration of HTTP services, enabling the creation of a very simple event notification model in the form of HTTP requests. By subscribing to a webhook, you can focus on updates on other services and get notified when they are updated. This makes it possible to have a large number of integration scenarios. You will be able to interact with other services, get notified when changes are made, and act accordingly. This integration can include any form, such as uploading a new file in Dropbox, a new issue in Trello, or a payment operation via PayPal. With the increasing use of webhooks, this application scenario will also generate exponential growth.
2. Although the model itself is not complex, there are some basic rules that need to be addressed. This includes security models, data formats, and various variants based on this basic pattern. The trouble is that most webhook providers now have subtle differences in dealing with these basic rules. This difference is like snowflakes, although each snowflake looks very similar, but there are some special things. The purpose of the ASP. NET Webhooks is to handle all these tedious parts, provide a unified user model, and enable users to quickly start the task of consolidating between services

Infoq:webhook There are no other established protocols in addition to HTTP, are there any limitations on the sender? (as a recipient) is ASP. NET Webhooks automatically compatible with those services that are now available Webhook?

HN: We've provided webhook for a variety of services in our projects, such as Azure

Alerts, BitBucket, Dropbox, GitHub, Kudu, Instagram,

MailChimp, PayPal, Pusher, Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, Trello, and WordPress, but it's easy to add support for other providers, and the list of supported services continues to grow. In fact, support for Kudu and bitbucket is from the pull request submitted by the Community, and we are adding support for more providers.

InfoQ: What is the roadmap for Webhooks until it is officially released?

HN: We don't have any formal statements about the official release plan, but we are happy to listen to feedback from the community and accept their contributions, including pull requests and various suggestions.

BG: We've got some feedback from the community, and they want to be able to debug the ability of the Webhook to receive messages as if they were on a local mode. They also appreciate the idea of remote debugging, but prefer to be able to launch their project and send Webhook by clicking on "F5". We are currently designing prototypes for some ideas to bring this feature to the VisualStudio.

The ASP. NET Webhooks is an open source project hosted on the GitHub platform.

Microsoft publishes ASP. Webhooks Preview Version