Build a multi-tenant CRM web app on ASP.NET Core MVC

We’re going to progressively build a simple multi-tenant CRM software as a service (SaaS) web app, named SuperCRM, with support for both individual and team accounts.

Create the SuperCRM project

Let’s create the SuperCRM project using the ASPSecurityKit’s MVC template for ASP.NET Core. We’ll use the DotNet New command to initialize the project with MVC template:

1. Open command prompt and execute the following command to install the ASK’s templates package:

dotnet new -i ASPSecurityKit.Templates

2. Create the project using the MVC template in the specified folder:

dotnet new askmvc -n SuperCRM -o "D:\My Projects\SuperCRM"

You can now open the project in Visual Studio from D:\My Projects\SuperCRM\SuperCRM.csproj.

What’s inside the project?

ASPSecurityKit.NetCore Nuget package

The ASPSecurityKit.NetCore NuGet package is the ASPSecurityKit (ASK) security framework. It provides the Zero Trust based security pipeline that subjects every incoming request into your MVC web app to a series of identity and access checks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), authentication (variety of schemes such as HMAC, cookie), multi-factor auth, IP-firewall, user verification, activity-based data-aware authorization (ADA), suspension.

Essential source package

ASK’s primary goal is to give you complete freedom as to how should the implementation of security models, repositories and data access be. Therefore, it operates on the interface-based design, wherein even the models/DTOs like IUser are represented with an interface. This approach gives you a number of benefits over the lock-down approach (that other frameworks like ASP.NET follows) such as to be able to treat a data model or a view model as your user entity. You can put validation and other attributes on the model properties. You don’t need to copy data back and forth between the framework and your app models.

The flexibility is good, you may say, but you do need to write an implementation and wire up before you can use ASK. Well, you don’t! To save you time, an ASK Essential source package installs an implementation of these interfaces, as source code, right into your project.

The MVC template comes with this source code pre-installed. It contains repositories, models, EntityFramework migrations, dependency injection and other helper utilities.

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