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<li>
<a asp-controller="Todo" asp-action="Index">My to-dos</a>
</li>
The asp-controller and asp-action attributes on the <a> element
are called tag helpers. Before the view is rendered, ASP.NET Core
replaces these tag helpers with real HTML attributes. In this case, a URL
to the /Todo/Index route is generated and added to the <a> element
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Update the layout
as an href attribute. This means you don't have to hard-code the route
to the TodoController . Instead, ASP.NET Core generates it for you
automatically.
If you've used Razor in ASP.NET 4.x, you'll notice some syntax
changes. Instead of using @Html.ActionLink() to generate a link
to an action, tag helpers are now the recommended way to create
links in your views. Tag helpers are useful for forms, too (you'll see
why in a later chapter). You can learn about other tag helpers in
the documentation at https://docs.asp.net.
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Add external packages
Add external packages
One of the big advantages of using a mature ecosystem like .NET is that
the number of third-party packages and plugins is huge. Just like other
package systems, you can download and install .NET packages that help
with almost any task or problem you can imagine.
NuGet is both the package manager tool and the official package
repository (at https://www.nuget.org). You can search for NuGet
packages on the web, and install them from your local machine through
the terminal (or the GUI, if you're using Visual Studio).
Install the Humanizer package
At the end of the last chapter, the to-do application displayed to-do
items like this:
The due date column is displaying dates in a format that's good for
machines (called ISO 8601), but clunky for humans. Wouldn't it be nicer
if it simply read "X days from now"?
You could write code yourself that converted an ISO 8601 date into a
human-friendly string, but fortunately, there's a faster way.
The Humanizer package on NuGet solves this problem by providing
methods that can "humanize" or rewrite almost anything: dates, times,
durations, numbers, and so on. It's a fantastic and useful open-source
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Add external packages
project that's published under the permissive MIT license.
To add it to your project, run this command in the terminal:
dotnet add package Humanizer
If you peek at the AspNetCoreTodo.csproj project file, you'll see a new
PackageReference line that references Humanizer .
Use Humanizer in the view
To use a package in your code, you usually need to add a using
statement that imports the package at the top of the file.