Getting Started with ASP.NET Core Tutorials
If you’re developing apps or services for the web, you’re bound to be using ASP.NET. This language framework is one of Microsoft’s gifts to the development world for building dynamic web sites, apps and services. It has been around since early 2002. It actually succeeded Microsoft's Active Server Pages (hence the ASP in ASP.NET) technology.
And now there’s ASP.NET's successor ASP.NET Core. The Core version is built around a new open-source, cross-platform .NET compiler. Codenamed “Roslyn” when it was under development, it was often jokingly referred to as the “worst kept secret at Microsoft,” since they didn’t seemed as concerned about secrecy as they often do when new releases are in the works.
So you’re developing web apps and services and you want to become more proficient in ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core? You’re in luck. Another trip through the blogosphere revealed a healthy handful of ASP.NET Core tutorials. Here’s a look:
This is the official Microsoft ASP.NET Core tutorial site. It covers broad categories like building web applications, building web APIs, working with data, authentication and authorization, client-side development, testing, publishing and deployment. These ASP.NET Core tutorials do a good job of taking you right from the start. Under the building web apps category, for example, there are tutorial segments for Your first ASP.NET Core application on a Mac or Linux using Visual Studio Code, Building your first ASP.NET Core MVC app with Visual Studio, and Getting started with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core using Visual Studio.
And in the next category, building Web APIs, there are segments on Building your first web API with ASP.NET Core MVC and Visual Studio, ASP.NET Web API Help Pages using Swagger and Creating backend web services for native mobile applications.
This one is part of Tutorialspoint, which also covers the original version of ASP.NET. These are very much first-timer oriented. The ASP.NET Core tutorials cover an overview, environment setup, new project, project layout, exceptions, set up MVC, MVC design patterns, routing, action results, and a handful of other topics.
The regular ASP.NET section they describe as basic ASP.NET programming will bring you to a moderate level of expertise in ASP.NET. The site recommends starting with an understanding of the .NET programming language and other web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and AJAX. The ASP.NET tutorials cover environment, life cycle, event handling, server side and server controls, client side, directors, validators, file uploading, multi views, AJAX control, data sources, data binding, and debugging. There’s a whole list of other specific topics as well. These pretty much cover all the ins and outs of ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core.
Once you’re rolling with ASP.NET and want to branch out to Core, check this one out. This covers the latest and greatest in the latest version. The site recommends, "You basically need to update your project.json file, targeting the version 1.1 of the framework and the NuGet packages. If you are using VS 2015, you might also need to update or create a global.json file that pins the target framework to be used with your project, in case you run into issues with multiple versions installed locally side by side."
The tutorial covers the major new feature areas in ASP.NET Core 1.1, including middleware as filters, the rewrite module, viewing components as tag filters, viewing compilation, response compression and caching, cookie storage for TempData, and some of the other less notable improvements. These are hardcore higher level tutorials, complete with code snippets and detailed descriptions. In the first piece on using middleware as filters, it explains, "If you check the source code, when a middleware is added as a filter, it is effectively being added as a Resource Filter. This means the middleware executes after routing and authorization but before everything else. You now will be able to:
- Add middleware (your own or third party provided) to particular controllers or actions. For example, you could add the new compression middleware only to particular actions.
- Use Route features like the RouteData values extracted by the routing middleware.
The first option means greater flexibility. The second might not seem much, but it makes a great difference in some scenarios."
It follows up each topic with code snippets to demonstrate how to do what the tutorial has just explained. There are other ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core tutorials out there, but these were some that rose to the top, in my humble opinion. Let me know what you think at llow@1105media.com.
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/31/2017