AYN — All You Need.

A full-stack peer-to-peer trading platform built with ASP.NET Core

Buy it. Sell it. Find everything you need — all in one place.

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🧭 What is AYN?

AYN (All You Need) is a production-grade, peer-to-peer online marketplace built from scratch as a full-stack ASP.NET Core web application. It allows users to list items for sale, discover and purchase goods from other users, communicate in real time, and complete transactions securely — all within a single, cohesive platform.

This is not a tutorial project. It is a complete, layered application built with industry-standard architecture, a rich feature set, a live CI/CD pipeline, and a professional-grade tech stack — the result of bringing together everything learned across multiple courses and personal deep-dives into the .NET ecosystem.

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✨ Feature Highlights

🛒 Marketplace Core

• Create, edit, and delete listings — title, description, price, category, subcategory, condition, and up to multiple images per ad
• Rich-text ad descriptions powered by TinyMCE with HTML sanitization via HtmlSanitizer
• Image upload & storage through Cloudinary CDN — fast, optimized, globally delivered
• Advanced search & filtering — by keyword, category, subcategory, price range, town, and sort order
• Watchlist / Favourites — save any listing and revisit it anytime from your profile

💬 Real-Time Chat

• Live messaging between buyers and sellers powered by SignalR WebSockets
• Persistent conversation history — no messages are ever lost
• Clean, responsive chat UI with unread message indicators

💳 Payments

• Stripe integration for secure, card-based payments directly within the platform
• Smooth checkout flow with real-time validation

📧 Email & Notifications

• SendGrid transactional email — account confirmation, password reset, and system notifications
• In-app notification system keeping users informed of activity on their listings

⏰ Background Jobs

• Hangfire scheduled tasks — automated cleanup, periodic data processing, and recurring system operations
• Full Hangfire Dashboard for monitoring jobs in real time

👤 User Accounts & Security

• ASP.NET Core Identity — registration, login, role-based authorization
• Email confirmation flow and secure password reset
• Admin area with user management — promote, demote, ban, and unban users
• StyleCop + custom ruleset enforcing consistent, clean code across the entire codebase

📊 Administration

• Full Admin Dashboard — manage categories, subcategories, towns, and platform users
• Data scraping powered by AngleSharp for seeding realistic category and location data
• Role-based access control — users vs. administrators

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🏗️ Architecture

AYN follows a clean layered architecture separating concerns across distinct projects:

AYN/
├── AYN.Common/          # Shared constants, helpers, GlobalConstants
├── Data/
│   ├── AYN.Data/        # DbContext, EF Core configuration, seeding
│   ├── AYN.Data.Common/ # Repository pattern, base interfaces
│   └── AYN.Data.Models/ # Domain entities (Ad, User, Category, Message…)
├── Services/
│   ├── AYN.Services/    # Business logic — ads, users, chat, notifications…
│   └── AYN.Services.Data/ # Data-access services, AutoMapper profiles
├── Tests/
│   └── AYN.Services.Tests/ # Unit tests with nUnit + Moq
└── Web/
    ├── AYN.Web/         # ASP.NET Core MVC — controllers, views, areas
    └── AYN.Web.ViewModels/ # Input & view models, DTOs

Every layer communicates through interfaces, enabling full testability and clean separation of concerns. The repository pattern abstracts all data access, and AutoMapper handles all object-to-object mapping between layers.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Backend

Technology	Purpose
ASP.NET Core	Web framework — MVC, Razor views, middleware pipeline
Entity Framework Core	ORM — code-first, migrations, LINQ queries
SignalR	Real-time WebSocket communication (chat)
ASP.NET Core Identity	Authentication, authorization, role management
Hangfire	Background job scheduling and processing
AutoMapper	Object mapping between layers
AngleSharp	HTML parsing and data scraping for seeding
HtmlSanitizer	Sanitizes user-generated rich-text content

Integrations

Integration	Purpose
Stripe	Payment processing
SendGrid	Transactional email delivery
Cloudinary	Image upload, storage, and CDN delivery

Frontend

Technology	Purpose
Bootstrap	Responsive UI framework
jQuery	DOM manipulation and AJAX calls
TinyMCE	Rich-text editor for ad descriptions
SCSS	Custom styling and theme overrides

Testing & Quality

Tool	Purpose
nUnit	Unit testing framework
Moq	Mocking library for isolated service tests
StyleCop	Code style enforcement across the solution
GitHub Actions	CI/CD pipeline — build and test on every push

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🗂️ Data Model Overview

The application is built around a rich relational domain model:

• Users — extended ASP.NET Identity user with profile image, town, phone, and activity metadata
• Ads — listings with category, subcategory, condition, price, location, images, and view count
• Categories & Subcategories — hierarchical classification of listings
• Towns — location data for filtering and discovery
• Messages — real-time chat messages between users, associated with a conversation thread
• Notifications — system and user-generated notifications
• Watchlist entries — per-user saved/favourited listings

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• .NET 5+ SDK
• SQL Server (local or remote)
• Visual Studio 2019+ or JetBrains Rider
• Accounts for: Stripe, SendGrid, Cloudinary (optional — core features work without them)

Setup

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/georgidelchev/AYN-.git
   cd AYN-

2. Configure secrets — in Web/AYN.Web/appsettings.json (or user secrets), set your connection string and API keys:

   {
     "ConnectionStrings": {
       "DefaultConnection": "Server=.;Database=AYN;Trusted_Connection=True;"
     },
     "Stripe": { "SecretKey": "...", "PublishableKey": "..." },
     "SendGrid": { "ApiKey": "..." },
     "Cloudinary": { "CloudName": "...", "ApiKey": "...", "ApiSecret": "..." }
   }

3. Apply migrations & seed the database

   cd Web/AYN.Web
   dotnet ef database update
   dotnet run

4. Run the tests

   cd Tests/AYN.Services.Tests
   dotnet test

5. Open your browser at https://localhost:5001 🎉

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🔄 CI/CD Pipeline

AYN includes a GitHub Actions workflow that automatically builds and runs all tests on every push and pull request to main, ensuring the codebase stays green at all times.

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👤 Author

Georgi Delchev

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🙏 Acknowledgements

• Project scaffolding based on Nikolay Kostov's ASP.NET Core Template
• The entire SoftUni community for the learning environment and inspiration

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📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

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If you found this project useful or interesting, a ⭐ goes a long way — thank you!