Where’s Lou

Hello again! Now let’s talk about Ghost.exe.

As you may be aware – OWIN can be thought of as a port of Rack or WSGI specification to .NET, and Gate can be thought of as a reference implementation the of Rack utility and middleware library.

If you’ve used Rack then you’re probably familiar with the rackup executable. It provides a way to load a web site and run it on a web server that doesn’t provide it’s own executable. That is more or less the role Ghost.exe plays in the overall OWIN/Gate suite.

By now you’re thinking, “That’s awesome, stop typing and tell me how to get some of that!” and the easiest way is with Chocolatey – a nuget-based software distribution mechanism. The easiest way to get Chocolatey is from the VS Package Manager Console.
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Hello again, everyone! As I’m sure you already know, ASP.NET MVC 4 beta is available and it has some fantastic stuff in it! One of the interesting bits is the latest ASP.NET Web API.

Looking at that, I’m absolutely certain you’re thinking the same thing Glenn Block was saying on Twitter:

@gblock: hmm I really wish there was an Owin adapter for #aspnetwebapi! /cc:@loudej

Wish no longer! Gate has a new drop available, version 0.3.4, and it contains a Get.Adapters.AspNetWebApi package which does exactly that – enabling you to mix the Web API into your OWIN based web applications.

Let’s take a look at how that feels. That should be even easier than before because of a few more things that are new in Gate – a handful of Quickstart nuget packages, and a Ghost “generic host” process which lets you use any of the available OWIN http servers interchangeably. Neat, right? Let’s jump right into that!
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